Debut

As icons of modern art go, Damien Hirst’s 14 foot tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde couldn’t have made a bigger splash if it had swum up the Thames singing show tunes and wearing a top hat. Also part of the epoch-making Sensation show at the Royal Academy five years later in 1997, Hirst was one of a vanguard of Young British Artists who helped define the Cool Britannia vibe of the 90s.

When the smiling saw-toothed Tony Blair surfed into Downing Street on a wave of popular approval that same year, the palpable mandate around his neck was to rid the country of the destructive, sleazy rule of nearly two decades of Conservative government. With their ‘no such thing as society’ proclamations, their back-to-basics victimisation of the most vulnerable, the wholesale transfer of public assets into the coffers of the unaccountable, and non-stop playing of the system that landed at least two senior Ministers in jail, the public had had enough of 18 years of Tory me-ism; the party was sentenced by the ballot box to serve a generation in the political wilderness. It’s perhaps also no surprise that the charismatic Blair invited Hirst and other artists from across the creative spectrum to join him in the victory celebrations at Number Ten.

The title of Hirst’s 1992 signature piece is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Eventually sold for $12 million to an American collector in 2004, it’s conceivable to imagine that Hirst’s work – and later, that show - fired the silent starting pistol of a decade and a half of a different kind of conspicuous consumption.

If New Labour were elected on a sweep out the old ticket, then perhaps someone forgot to look into their crystal ball to see exactly what that would mean in practice. Yes, better hospitals, shorter waiting lists, more facilities. Yes, full employment, fairer benefits, better services. Yes, education, education, education. But while the Commons was, in those early halcyon days, almost a mirror of society in all its colours, backgrounds, personal orientations, there was a big hungry shark circling just beneath the surface of the Westminster pond.

Heady with power and with an unstoppable mandate from the electorate, some of the anointed ones soon found a taste for champagne socialism. Even if not publicly acknowledged, behind closed doors the Exchequer thrived on the swollen river of cash that flowed from a highly unregulated financial market. And unlike the small-time arms dealer or petty drugs baron, the industrial washing machines at the heart of government didn’t even need to launder the money. The times they were a booming, and the small voices of dissent – against war in Iraq, compulsory ID cards, the erosion of civil liberties – were drowned out by the sound of corks popping.

At 43, Damien Hirst is no longer young. Tony Blair has left office for pastures new. No more parties for pop singers and artists enliven the stale stuffy halls of Downing Street. The collective blinkers have been lifted from the public’s eyes to show the bankers and the traders as egotistical gamblers. Politicians of all party colours have been unmasked and defrocked for their expenses folly by a beleaguered and thrift-driven electorate. Cabinet Ministers are re-shuffled like a deck of cheap playing cards in the hands of a dead man walking.

On a perfect early summer day like today, the countryside is at its most magnificent. Its beauty is simply startling. It is quite literally breathtaking. It’s impossible to imagine on a day like today - when it will be still light at 10 at night - that once again in a few months time it’ll be dark by 4 in the afternoon. It’s equally impossible to recount now how, from those heady heady days of 1997, that all that good will could have tragically poured right down the drain.

The European and local elections tomorrow are expected to land a fatal blow to the heart of the Government. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living? Quite.