It has been suggested that Mr Howard may have felt obliged to consult Jack Straw, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, about any controversial decisions in the run up to the election, but that he wanted to avoid doing so.. The Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum are set to make their names as dinner party accessories. The two national institutions are hoping that design-conscious hostesses will want walls painted in Tate Gallery “minimal blue” and sideboards gleaming with Victoria and Albert Museum polish.
If that fails to impress the dinner party guests, then wait till they need a pee. There, in the bathroom, are Paula Rego tiles, hand painted by one of the most acclaimed contemporary figurative artists.And that necklace the hostess keeps running her fingers through so conspicuously. That “is designed by Maggi Hambling herself, darling, my own little gesture towards conceptualism”.Britain’s best-known art institutions have decided to raise both money and awareness by plunging into the commercial arena of home furnishings.Habitat, the middle-class home furnishings nirvana, has been licensed by the Tate Gallery to sell Tate household paints. And the V & A is going to allow its name to be put on a new brand of supermarket furniture polish.

The Tate will also be issuing the work of Paula Rego on limited edition tiles. Both the Tate and the V & A have decided to make new departures in their marketing strategies in order to raise money and win a new breed of visitor for their collections.A spokeswoman for the Tate said yesterday: “We want to promote the Tate to a new audience, the sort of people who would shop at Habitat, the 25- 35s who are interested in interior design, and we think would also be interested in coming to the Tate.” She added that the Paula Rego hand- painted tiles were decorative and could “certainly be used in the bathroom”.In addition to the Paula Rego hand- decorated tiles, the Tate’s own shop in the Gallery will be selling jewellery designed by Maggi Hambling and greeting cards by contemporary artists, including Fiona Rae, Tim Head, Lubaina Himid and Michael Landy.Rego, who has a retrospective show on at the Tate, Liverpool, was commissioned by the Tate to produce the hand-painted tiles from her original designs, selling at pounds 50 each. In a separate commercial exploitation of its own name, the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, has given Habitat permission to sell Tate household paints in its 38 stores. They will retail at pounds 19 each, with pounds 1 on every sale going to the gallery.Habitat claims the colours of the household paints are named after movements in modern art, though the connection appears a loose one. The store will be selling future orange, modern yellow, abstract green, minimal blue, real turquoise and pure white.The Tate’s move into commercial exploitation is matched by the latest venture from the V & A, which is to launch its own range of furniture care products.Ken Mannering, head of marketing at V & A Enterprises, the museum’s commercial arm, said the expertise of the museum’s conservation department could contribute to creating a new polish: “Some products for the very elite market probably already have the qualities we hope ours will have, but we want to endorse a mass market product. I hope the polishes will be sold in supermarkets.”The museum already licenses companies to sell V & A products including wallpaper, carpets, bed linen, china, glass and clothes, particularly wedding dresses and christening gowns.. The Today programme lost the plot yesterday as a twat, a Sprat and a 40ft sperm whale cut a swathe of hilarity through the presenters of the BBC’s most serious news programme.

The trouble started with an item in the 8am news bulletin from Papua New Guinea where the government has appointed General Jack Tuat as chief of staff to calm troops following the furore over its use of mercenaries.
Unfortunately Mr Tuat’s name is pronounced “twat”. Immediately after the report about Mr Tuat’s promotion, Charlotte Green, Radio 4’s experienced news reader and continuity announcer, had to read a report about the 40ft sperm whale stuck in the Firth of Forth. The clash of the two items proved too much for her and after a few words her report on Moby the whale disappeared in a fit of giggles.Once Ms Green had struggled through the short item she handed over to presenter James Naughtie who, it has to be said, sounds a more humourous chap anyway. Poor Mr Naughtie was then faced with a very serious story about the escape tunnel discovered at the Maze prison in Belfast.

Waiting on the line was a very angry spokesman from the Northern Ireland Prison Officers’ Association. Unfortunately, the POA spokesman’s name was Mr Findlay Spratt.Now we are sure that Mr Spratt is a very serious and important man – and that James Naughtie thinks so too – but unfortunately after Ms Green’s giggles, Mr Naughtie balked at the name on his prompt sheet and could not help a guffaw himself.However, Mr Naughtie did call him Mr Spratt, as a careful listening to a tape of the programme later proved, even if up and down the country millions were convinced Naughtie had actually welcomed a Mr Prat.A BBC spokesman said later that he would not want anyone to suggest the presenters’ professionalism was anything but total. These things happen, he said.Ms Green is one of the BBC’s most familiar voices. Her precision and clarity are required for slots such as the Shipping Forecast, where mariners’ lives may be on the line.She famously managed to keep a straight voice even when required to introduce the cast of a Radio 4 play called Heartache: “Richard Griffiths as the Brain, Lee Montague as the Heart, Jim Broadbent as the Stomach, and David de Keyser as the Penis”. However, yesterday was not the first time she has shown a capacity for hysterics.She was one of the highlights of Radio 4’s News Quiz last year, on which she reads out panellists’ cuttings, when Alan Coren ambushed her by reading out her announcement of “a cross-flannel cherry” being grounded on a sand bank.. The discovery of a 40ft (12m) long tunnel dug by IRA prisoners in the Maze prison, supposedly the United Kingdom’s most secure jail, yesterday led to a security alert in Northern Ireland. The tunnel began from a cell in H-7, one of the H-blocks which became known to the world during the republican hunger strikes of the early 1980s.

Its discovery led to Unionist calls for an inquiry and the disciplining of senior staff. The tunnel had passed underneath a fence around the H- block. To reach the outside world beyond the prison’s high outer perimeter wall the IRA prisoners had another 90ft to cover.
Had this been achieved, 95 republicans, all classed as high-security prisoners, could have been let loose into the countryside. Such an incident would have dwarfed even the 1983 IRA “great escape”, when 38 IRA inmates broke out through the main gate.As it is, the incident is embarrassing for the Government and calls into question the unique way in which the prison is run.The tunnel was at least 5ft underground and was lit by electric light, which has been a feature of IRA tunnels since at least the 1970s.Prison staff said it was shored up with chair legs and in particular with bedboards which had been provided for inmates with supposedly sore backs.Finlay Spratt, of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: “It would appear they could request the bedboards when they wanted one, and nobody seemed to keep any check on it.”Mr Spratt has repeatedly complained in recent years that prisoners have almost unlimited freedom within the H-blocks.Inside each block, cells are not locked, there is free association, and prisoners are organised not by staff but by the paramilitary organisations to which they belong. Searches are often resisted.All attempts by the authorities over a quarter of a century have failed to eradicate this strong element of paramilitary control.