I am sorry to see that the Pontypridd MP, Kim Howells, will be standing down at the general election.
As a minister, he was always forthright, yet courteous. However, it was his outraged comment on the 2002 Turner Prize exhibition in Tate Britain that particularly endeared me and, I would guess, millions of others to the former Communist NUM official.
Having surveyed a display that included a suspended Perspex ceiling and a billboard describing a pornographic film, Howells left a note reading: “If this is the best that British artists can produce, then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.”
I have a feeling that Turner himself would have agreed.
