The affable Mr Hayes and a war on ugliness
JOHN Hayes has been shunted back to Transport. At just 58 years of age, Mr Hayes considers himself one of the grand old men of government, a stooping consigliere able to counsel the Cabinet’s pups.
Stout, shortish Hayes is the sort of fogey who addresses colleagues in their sixth decade as ‘young man’. In the street he wears a hat with muchthumbed brim. His affability is mottled by the patina of verdigris and he loves to quote literary giants – Cicero, Ruskin, and perhaps a couplet from Showaddywaddy for bathetic effect.
At Transport Questions yesterday he could be found on the front bench alongside his Secretary of State, Chris Grayling. The ostentatiously bookish Hayes beside leaden-witted Grayling: Parliament has this knack for comic contrasts. Poor Grayling, yesterday placing a hand on one hip as he bawled partisan abuse at Labour, has little grasp of what a clog-hoofed donkey he is at oratory; yet he was brave on Brexit last year, so we must not be too harsh.
Mr Hayes’s ministerial progress has been a mid-table affair. In 2010 he was an Education minister. After two years he was switched to Energy before becoming Minister without Portfolio. There came a journey to Transport before translation to Security Minister at the Home Office (big job). Last July he was returned to Transport, parked in a siding. His florid flourishes had felt at odds with the Security brief. David Cameron found Hayes an amusing courtier but Mrs May saw him up close in her department. I suspect he irritated her greatly.
Mr Hayes, however, is irrepressible, a bon-mot seldom far from his puckering lips. He may be slightly absurd, the sort of over- courtly Osric whom Shakespeare would have punctured by poignard in the 4th Act, but Westminster needs its variety turns. He has not betrayed disappointment at his return to humdrum Transport.
Instead he has embarked on one of the more interesting missions in Whitehall: to improve public-transport design and make its architecture more beautiful.
Yesterday he promised a ‘new design guide’ for transport buildings. He would seek to expunge ‘the crass modernists and harsh brutalists’.
The Hayes campaign against ‘the cult of ugliness’ began last November with a speech which he described yesterday as being ‘rapturously received and beautifully articulated’. Such boasting may sound prattish but Mr Hayes does it with self-mockery. Thus does he hope to deflect criticism.
In his November speech he argued that there was ‘ something pro- foundly elitist about the way ugliness has been imposed’ on us by today’s architects. Show- offish designers were ‘rewarded by critics and investors, eager to associate themselves with the momentary shock of brash novelty. Few of the culprits would choose to live or spend their own working lives in the structures they make. We have had enough of the desecration of our towns and cities’.
THEGovernment is spending billions of pounds on transport projects. Mr Hayes, describing himself as a David to take on the Philistines, said he intended to use that money in part to revitalise ‘the public realm of the beautiful’.
Those of you sitting on delayed and crowded trains today may say ‘what hot air’. Why is a Transport minister talking about beauty? That is an easy argument to make but it is the attitude that landed us with the design horrors of, for instance, London’s Euston Station, Birmingham’s old New Street (now much more beautiful with an amazing roof) and the horrible roads that ruined Plymouth in the mid 20th century.
Mr Hayes, while accepting the limitations of his immediate executive power and swallowing that pride, is aiming for something that may be far more important in the long term. Concern about beauty in public- sector design is something thoroughly Tory and properly meritocratic, but it was badly neglected by the Conservatives in recent years. The Cameroons appeased modernism terribly.
A minister who can give bullying, Marxist, brutalist architects a kick up the rump would be very much worth having.