All Arts Ministers Are Quite Useless

Given that Her Majesty's Government's idea of legitimate public culture begins with statues of Cecil Rhodes and ends with the latest Churchill hagiopic, we should perhaps be favourably surprised that the arts minister has so far defied market forces as to slap an export bar on a Victorian photograph album. The photographer was only a woman, and the subjects include a lachrymose Ethiopian migrant and a couple of mere scientists; but the album does also feature Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poetic glorification of the Light Brigade fiasco has been a template for sanctified patriotic stupidity from the Crimea to Brexit. Even so, the album will probably end up being sold abroad, because state-maintained culture is a Stalinist imposition and because the British arts minister has better things to do than keep British art in the country.