What David Cameron's passion for Tracey Emin really means

The prime minister has installed a neon artwork by the controversial artist in No 10. What would Melanie Phillips say?


This week's unveiling of a neon artwork by Tracey Emin in 10 Downing Street looks very much like an attempt to balance the new image of Cameron the moral conservative backlash-surfer with a sop to contemporary cultural cool. For any remaining liberal supporters of the coalition, don't despair – here's an Emin to show how modern Cameron really is.

Emin is 48 but her art still carries the tag "young British". A neon by her in No 10 can only signal youth, glamour, and a dash of naughtiness. It even alludes to her great themes of love and lust in its slogan "more passion". Wow, the prime minister must really be down with the kids, we are presumably supposed to think. Is that why he is locking so many of them up?

Right now the prime minister is standing shoulder to shoulder with conservative pundits who claim the riots are the result of decades of liberal rot. If there is an icon of such supposed rot – never mind who she votes for – surely it is Emin? This woman first became famous because she put the names of her lovers on a tent. She photographed herself sitting in a pile of cash and appeared drunk on live television. Her much-debated Turner prize exhibit was an unmade bed cluttered with evidence of a lifestyle the columnist Melanie Phillips, whose trenchant social views Cameron now appears to side with, would have no trouble diagnosing as morally sick and probably the product of a broken home.

In the Sunday Express this weekend the prime minister appealed directly to older voters scared stiff of the rampaging young. Emin is exactly what many older conservatives loathe - a defiantly unrespectable woman who will never seem "middle class" however rich she becomes. Emin is in her own description Mad Tracey from Margate, and whatever you think of her art, a stern moral example it is not. What does it really mean, this Downing Street neon?

Perhaps it means Cameron does not mean a word of what he says. His new rigidity is as fake as his old capaciousness. The new conservatism is a cynical appeal to voters who are themselves filled with contradictions. There has been no sudden change since the riots in how people amuse themselves, and laughing at freak shows such as Big Brother and The X Factor remains popular. In other words, as is the way of things, those who call for a moral reform of society do not include themselves, or their tastes, in the reform. In the same spirit of glibly refusing to think anything through, Cameron installs a work of art by Britain's most "immoral" artist even as he calls on the nation to change its ways. More passion? I don't think so.

Tony Blair has criticised Cameron's "highfalutin wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally." It is a reminder of how different they actually are as politicians. Blair associated New Labour with new culture, but there were no direct affiliations between him and any particular artist (Blair notoriously mistook a novelist for an artist at the opening of Tate Modern). And that is wise: get too close to artists and you open up all kinds of ironies. Especially if you propose to clean up Britain while cosying up to one of its most gifted creators of filth.