Portraiture and Politics

The London Evening Standard reports that British MPs have spent £250,000 of public money on official portraits of their colleagues. The response, deliberately framed within the context of Britain’s current regime of financial austerity, has been unsurprisingly—and rather unimaginatively—critical. Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the campaign group Taxpayers’ Alliance, for instance, has described the expenditure as “an expensive vanity project” and the Evening Standard dubs it a spending ‘spree’ in which MPs ‘splurged’ taxpayers’ money.