Museum Values

The former Batrachian in Charge of Putting Teachers in their Place, Lord Baker of Smirking, seems to be trying to ingratiate himself with the Glorious Successor by proposing a National Museum of Glorious Britishness. As Tristram Hunt points out, when Baker was education secretary under Margaret Thatcher his idea of history was a "Westminster-and-Whitehall view of the past that mainly entailed good chaps doing good things", or as Orwell put it somewhere, a list of battles won by the English. Accordingly, the idea of his museum is "to celebrate the great British values" which we share with George W Bush and the House of Saud, and "on which our culture, politics and society have been shaped"; our culture, politics and society being neither amorphous nor multifaceted, but a straight-run, teleologically determined path leading from Alfred the Great through Agincourt to Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and the final, overdue cessation of apologies for the Empire. Part of our trouble, you see, is that with all those repeats and remakes on the television, with advertisements for the latest exhibition at the Imperial War Museum plastered all over the Tube, with the whims and megrims of the House of Windsor splattered like a bulimic's banquet across the scumbag press, we just don't have any real sense of the past. Perhaps we've been living in it too long.