Rachel Reeves has been criticised for replacing a portrait of Nigel Lawson in her Treasury office with one of Ellen Wilkinson, the trail-blazing politician who organised the Jarrow March and was one of the first female cabinet ministers. Born in Manchester, Wilkinson became an MP for Jarrow in 1935 and a year later organised the march known as the Jarrow Crusade, as workers from the north-east walked to London to protest soaring unemployment that had devastated the area. Nicknamed “Red Ellen” by the press, Wilkinson also worked as a journalist and was known for her passionate defences of the working class in parliament and in public until her sudden death at 55 in 1947.
She was a founding member of the Communist party of Great Britain but always retained membership of the Labour party, becoming education secretary in Clement Attlee’s postwar cabinet, and also served in Churchill’s wartime government. The Telegraph said that, although Reeves was “entitled to hang whatever pictures she likes” in her office, the inclusion of Wilkinson “reveals something about the direction in which she and her boss want to take the country”. When asked about the switch, a Treasury spokesperson gave the newspaper a one word answer: “Change”. Reeves, who is the first female chancellor, had previously pledged to ensure all the art hanging in No 11 Downing Street is either by female artists or of female figures.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, was recently criticised after he removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher shortly after moving into Downing Street, reportedly saying he dislikes “pictures of people staring down at him”. Time Out’s art editor, Eddy Frankel, said that the new government’s art choices signified an administration that wanted to be seen to be doing things differently. “Any rehang is a reordering, a reprioritising of cultural symbols,” he said. “When it’s a government collection, that becomes even starker. It’s out with the old (and conservative) and in with new (and radical, modern).” The Daily Mail criticised the decision to include a pair of paintings that depict parts of Dame Paula Rego’s mural Crivelli’s Garden as part of the Downing Street rehang, claiming there was “mounting anger at Keir Starmer’s No 10 purge” of British figures, such as William Gladstone, whose portrait had been removed. The former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith told the paper the decision was “hysterical woke madness”, while claiming: “Labour doesn’t like our history or who we are.” Frankel said that the Rego piece was not that radical, considering it was painted more than 30 years ago and based on a renaissance altarpiece in the National Gallery’s collection. “Although some of Rego’s themes, especially the foregrounding of women and their stories, are ‘anti-establishment’ by today’s standards, maybe even by 1990s standards, Rego’s work is not radical art … it’s pretty much as ‘conservative’ as painting got in the 1990s,” he said. “It’s not like the new government has hung a photo of Sarah Lucas with fried eggs for tits on the walls of Whitehall, or whacked a Damien Hirst shark in the entrance of No 10.”