Tristram Hunt | The Spectator columnists & writers

At the V&A, we’ve done some Marie Kondo-style reordering

‘We humour them when they suggest absurd reforms, we placate them with small material comforts, but we heave sighs of relief when they go away and leave us to our jobs.’ I am glad to say that the approach adopted by one of my predecessors, Eric Maclagan, to the visiting public is no longer preferred policy at the V&A. Instead, this week we are desperate to welcome the British people back to their collections. For the past five months, South Kensington has felt too much like Miss Havisham’s mansion, with lots of dust sheets, unexplained noises and an overpowering sense of loss. To ensure we reopen properly, my favoured reading of recent weeks has been the British Medical Journal editorial explaining that surface transmission of Covid-19 is ‘relatively minimal’.

Ignore the activists – Humboldt’s Enlightenment project deserves celebrating

‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’ After some delays and bad luck, the grace and glory of the Humboldt name flourishes once again with the opening of the Humboldt Forum. Annoyingly digital to begin with, the launch last month of the Forum signalled the culmination of Berlin’s Museum Island restoration programme and, with it, the crowning of the capital’s place within contemporary European culture.

As V&A director, I won’t save Clive of India

‘Pray for us St Sebastian that we may deserve to pass through this pestilence,’ reads the inscription on a 15th-century reliquary imploring the patron saint of plague victims to assist Augsburg as the city faced another disease outbreak. Today, this exquisite silver offering — set with rock crystal, pearls and sapphires — sits alone in the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries of the V&A, patiently awaiting the return of the British public after our own Covid plague. During lockdown, curators have been selecting objects charting the design response to coronavirus — most notably, the NHS rainbows — which might join our existing collection of 18th-century smallpox mourning rings or 1993 Keith Lewis Aids brooch. The great wonder of the V&A is its ability to place our recent trauma within a broader chronicle of human experience, charted through material culture.

Diary - 7 February 2019

‘There is no other country in the world, besides my own, whose way of life I like so much,’ enthused the great French couturier Christian Dior. ‘I love English traditions, English politeness, English architecture. I even love English cooking.’ And that was in the 1950s. If pre-sales for the V&A’s Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams are any indication, the English seem super keen to return the love. Though I say so myself, this is a stunning exhibition, from the post-war New Look — condemned by Stafford Cripps for its anti-austerity ethos (a rather different Labour party in those days) — to the clean, sculptural chic of Maria Grazia Chiuri. Perhaps the popularity is down to the need for some Brexit-induced escapism — a dream world of Normandie gardens, Versailles picnics, and Belle Époque balls.

Diary - 28 March 2018

On the gently lapping shores of the Persian Gulf, in the steely shadow of the Burj Khalifa, I bump into former chief inspector of schools Sir Michael Wilshaw: I in my dishevelled blue trunks, he in his well-fitted white T-shirt (always strong on uniforms). We are guests of the Varkey Foundation’s global summit on education and skills. Whilst I am there to explain the V&A Museum’s new programme to support design teaching in industrial communities, Sir Michael is still rightly beating the drum for strong leadership and high standards. Aged 72, he remains a model of Carlylian workfulness, mentoring headteachers in Argentina while supporting a multi-academy trust in Derby. We are both full of admiration for the Brent art teacher Andria Zafirakou, winner of the Global Teacher Prize.

A spectre of Spanish revenge haunts Boris Johnson and the Brexit gang

I used to long for mid-October when I could say goodbye to the hot rooms, cold buffets, and warm white wine of party conference season. But ever since I swapped politics for the world of museums, I have happily rediscovered those autumnal weeks of blackberries, spider webs and London returning to life after summer. At the V&A, we opened our new opera exhibition, tracing the art form’s development from Monteverdi’s Venice to Shostakovich’s Moscow. At the British Museum, the Scythians have been reviving the art of ancient Siberia. And around the capital, Frieze Art Fair has been drawing the world’s aesthetes to London. What we don’t yet know is how Brexit will affect this cultural leadership. Any bureaucratic hurdles to borrowing artefacts from the Continent, paying VAT for purchases in the European Union, or limiting the curatorial talent able to work here could badly damage our future creative capacity.

Diary - 12 October 2017

Diary - 22 September 2016

'Are you here to seek political asylum?’ asked a clever young student after my lecture at the National University of Singapore. It has certainly not been a great start to the political year: the Boundary Commission abolished my constituency and Jeremy Corbyn’s office declared me a ‘non-person’ by placing me on a list of 13 undesirable MPs deemed to have insulted the Dear Leader. In many ways, Singapore felt a good place to be. Here the role of the Workers’ party is not really to challenge the ruling People’s Action party for power: they play the part of perpetual opposition. Which is eerily close to where Labour is heading. The ‘Liverpool of the East’ was the colonial nickname for Singapore — partly for its shipping economy, but also for its Edwardian waterfront architecture.

Theresa May has done a poor job of stealing Labour’s clothes

‘I don’t think we are a charity. We are a successful, multi-national educational institution,’ explained the public school head to me. And he was right. As it happens, he was a highly progressive head committed to using the wealth and resource he enjoyed to collaborate with an under-performing local academy. For the first time, their partner school now had maths graduates teaching physics and a new range of language options. But he had no doubt that he should not be in receipt of charitable status and tax relief. Which is why one of the few components of Theresa May’s school reforms I can support is the Prime Minister’s determination to introduce ‘stronger, more demanding public benefit tests for independent schools.

Labour’s England problem

In the window of a council house on a working-class estate in Exeter was a sticker bearing the cross of St George and a simple warning: ‘If this flag offends you, why not consider moving to another country?’ For some canvassers working on Labour MP Ben Bradshaw’s 2015 campaign, such a symbol naturally meant the dreaded ‘A’ on the canvas sheet: ‘Against Labour’. In fact, it was a household of solid Labour voters — supporting a party far too often offended by the flag. The truth is that the Labour party has an English problem. While members might just about embrace Britishness, too many feel queasy about Englishness — with all those connotations of ethnicity and chauvinism. Or as one activist put it to me, when I suggested we value English identity, ‘Why don’t you just join the British [sic] National Party?’ What is so strange is that the movement of William Morris and Robert Blatchford, J.

Diary - 14 January 2016

Whatever you do, don’t allow your six-year-old to be caught short at Crewkerne station. With the rain pouring and the wind howling, my daughter needed the loo. But it was locked. And no staff anywhere to be seen. So I pressed the ‘Help’ button on one of those machines that have replaced stationmasters. ‘How can I assist you?’ responded a warm South Asian voice. ‘Er, we need someone to open the loo at Crewkerne.’ ‘Where exactly are you?’ she came back, sounding lost. ‘You know, in Dorset, after Yeovil. On the Exeter line. How far away is the help centre?’ I was thinking Bristol, maybe Swindon. ‘Oh, we are in Mumbai,’ she declared. I am left with two thoughts: first, the extraordinary reach of globalisation; and, secondly, the contempt South-West Trains has for its customers if they think they can safely operate platforms in Wessex from Maharashtra.

I’m sure the Queen could cope with a new English national anthem

‘Thy choicest gifts in store / On her be pleased to pour.’ The prospect is upon Twickenham and Wembley regulars of the end of that second tricky verse. This week, Labour MPs packed into the Commons Chamber to support Toby Perkins’s English National Anthem Bill, which proposes replacing ‘God Save the Queen’ with an English anthem at English sporting events. Given that Wales has ‘Land of my Fathers’ and North Britain (sic) ‘Flower of Scotland’, then why not, say, Blake and Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ for the English? The Express and the Mail say we shouldn’t be ‘rude’ to the Queen, but the modern elision of monarchy and nation is a relative novelty. Many of our monarchs could not speak English; some tried to marry us off to foreign sovereigns; others abdicated.

Welcome to the era of emoji politics, where debate and rationality are suffocated

I break off the family holiday to campaign for my colleague Liz Kendall in the Labour leadership election. In Ipswich and Colchester, I found party members not so smitten by Corbynmania. In both constituencies, more people voted Tory than Labour: it remains unclear to me why heading further left would appeal to them. At every leadership election since the demise of Tony Blair the party has chosen a more left-wing candidate, and while Neil Kinnock might have ‘got his party back’, the country got a Tory government back. What is also evident is the anger among party members who have spent years delivering leaflets and are being called ‘Tories’ for not supporting Corbyn by people who joined the party weeks ago. We are entering the era of emoji politics, where identity and emotion suffocate debate and rationality.

Diary - 3 September 2015

‘Devon, Devon, Devon/ Where it rains six days out of seven.’ Nothing beats a British seaside holiday. And north Devon is especially blessed when it comes to vibrant weather patterns. We have watched in awe this summer as high-pressure systems from the Continent have collapsed in the face of sturdy Atlantic lows and extreme weather warnings punctuated the news. Our companion in all this has been the Met Office, whose forecasts are dashingly presented by the hunky Tomasz Schafernaker. So it was a shock to see the third-rate bureaucrats running the BBC replace it with some cheap and rather remote New Zealand outfit. Until recently, an institution like the BBC would have thought that supporting our science base, investing in UK-based research and development and having pride in a globally admired public organisation was part of its remit.

Here’s why we should save the Wedgwood Museum

A public appeal has been launched to save the Wedgwood Museum pottery collection, which is being sold to pay off the ceramics firm's pension bill. The museum entered administration in 2010 after the firm collapsed and its £134m pension debts were transferred to the museum trust. The Art Fund said it had raised about £13m to buy it, but that a further £2.7m was needed by 30 November in order to save the collection. Here's why we need to save this museum: We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s descendants. For it was in the aftermath of Maxwell’s plundering of the Mirror Group that the Pension Protection Fund was established to compensate pensioners in the wake of insolvency.

Caught between Marx and a monster

‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her speech was given.’ So Labour MP Robert Cunninghame Graham described Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, giving a speech to 100,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park at the height of the 1889 dock strike. ‘Brilliant, devoted and beautiful,’ agreed the trade union leader Ben Tillett. ‘During our great strike she worked unceasingly — a vivid and vital personality, with great force of character, courage and ability.’ And in Rachel Holmes’s bold, fluent, scholarly and rewarding new biography, Eleanor Marx’s voice as polemicist, activist, feminist and socialist is rediscovered.

Tristram Hunt’s diary: Why has Gove allowed a school that makes women wear the hijab?

ONE OF THE MINOR sociological treats of being appointed shadow education secretary is a frontbench view of David Cameron’s crimson tide — that half hour journey, every Question Time, during which the Prime Minister’s face turns from beatific calm to unedifying fury. It starts at 12.04 with the merest ripple of annoyance in his shiny, placid countenance. At 12.07, the ripple has become a swell of irritation, still far out to sea, at anyone daring to question the wisdom of government policy. By 12.10, it is a wave of indignation and wounded amour propre at the wilful duplicity of his opponents. And by 12.14, the crimson tide is crashing over the rocks of the dispatch box, back and forth for the next quarter of an hour.

Labour must make itself a movement again

‘As you enter the dock the sight of the forest of masts in the distance, and the tall chimneys vomiting clouds of black some, and the many coloured flags flying in the air, has a most peculiar effect ... Nearly everywhere you meet stacks of cork, or else yellow bins of sulphur, or lead-coloured copper-ore. As you enter this warehouse, the flooring is sticky, as if it had been newly tarred, with the sugar that has leaked through the casks.’ This was how Henry Mayhew described the 90 acres of London docks – stretching across St George, Shadwell and Wapping – in the 1850s. It was where the riches of the Empire came in, and the finished wares of the Workshop of the World went out. But it was also a landscape of Dickensian abuse, immiseration, and exploitation as dockers fought to make a living.

The British workforce needs skills to compete, not a race to the bottom

When J.B. Priestley visited Stoke-on-Trent on his 1934 ‘English Journey,’ he tried his hand throwing a vase at the Wedgwood factory in Etruria. It is fair to say, he lacked the skills. After a lot of jokes about ‘jollying’ and ‘jiggering’ and watching his vase flop back into clay, Priestley praised the craftsmen ‘doing something that they can do better than anybody else, and they know it ... Here is the supreme triumph of man’s creative thumb.’ Well, times have changed, but the way in which opinion formers think about skills has failed to move on much from Priestley. Of course, craft and artisanal skills remain essential to industries like the potteries, but the broader British workforce deserves a modern skills settlement.

How Eastleigh will show Labour is working

Politics offers few greater pleasures than watching a by-election candidate self-immolate. Not a day goes by without Maria Hutchings, the Conservative party’s prospective MP for Eastleigh (so plainly hating the whole thing), tossing another match on the pyre of her electoral credibility. But beyond the enjoyable barbarism of democracy, an important question is emerging from Eastleigh for the Labour party: how ready are we for government? Because if David Cameron cannot win in true blue Hampshire, on the back of a Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister perverting the course of justice, then he is well and truly stuffed. When the Eastleigh by-election was called, there was a lazy Westminster debate about Labour’s job being to decide which coalition partner should win.

This old House

‘If the Palace were not a listed building of the highest heritage value, its owners would probably be advised to demolish and rebuild.’ Heartlessly, this concludes the latest official report into the restoration of the Houses of Parliament. Four thousand miles away in New Delhi, it’s the same story. The Central Public Works Department has declared the constitutional masterpiece of Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker equally unfit for habitation. ‘We badly need a new parliament building,’ complains government minister Jairam Ramesh. ‘This one simply isn’t functional and is outdated.’ In the oldest parliament democracy and in the largest, the challenge is the same: what on earth to do with our Grade I* legislatures? Do we preserve or decant; modernise or historicise? But the competing solutions proposed by London and New Delhi offer a telling insight into two contrasting national psyches.

Gove’s paradox

By any standards, the Education Secretary is good news for history. He knows the subject, he likes the subject, and his ‘English Baccalaureate’ is already producing a marked upturn in pupils studying the past. Sadly, Michael Gove is also a Conservative — and a deeply ideological one at that. He has a certain vision of history and, with it, a ‘drum and trumpet’ view of what should be taught in our schools. I would be happy for pupils to learn this aspect of our past. But the problem the Education Secretary faces is how to marry that passion for Whiggish British history with an equally strong determination to liberalise the education system. In Gove’s ‘school reforms’ is a microcosm of that historic Tory tension between British parochialism and free-market fundamentalism.

Wedgwood Museum: At risk

We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s descendants. For it was in the aftermath of Maxwell’s plundering of the Mirror Group that the Pension Protection Fund was established to compensate pensioners in the wake of insolvency. And now this legislation is being used to asset-strip one of the great museums of England. On the southern edge of Stoke-on-Trent stands the Wedgwood Museum, dedicated to ‘The People Who Have Made Objects of Great Beauty from the Soils of Staffordshire’. A museum that in 2009 won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries, with judges praising it as a ‘brilliant snapshot’ highlighting the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce.

Eat, drink and be communist

In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’This was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ Pilsner, claret, and vast bowls of Maitrank — a May wine flavoured with woodruff — were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’.