Richard Ingrams: Masterclass in art forgery and fooling the rich

Notebook

'Genuine fakes for sale" was the offer in Private Eye's small ads column in 1986. Few people will have noticed it at the time but that offer, made by John Myatt, an impoverished painter, marked the beginning of one of the biggest and most successful art frauds of all time.

I have been reading with some fascination the story of what happened in a new book, The Conman by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. They tell how Myatt was recruited by John Drewe, the conman of the title, to paint pastiches of mostly 20th-century artists which he then infiltrated into the art market.

The genius of Drewe was to supply all of Myatt's pictures with forged "provenance" – letters, dealers' catalogues, receipts – all appearing to confirm their authenticity. Despite the doubts of some experts, the two men might have been still at it today had it not been for Drewe's estranged wife, who shopped him to the police.

The appeal of a story like this is that it exposes not just the forgers but the so-called experts who are unable to distinguish a fake from the genuine article, particularly when huge sums of money are involved. It was Andy Warhol who asked why many collectors instead of buying paintings didn't just hang a bag of money on their walls to show how rich they were.

This week a multimillionaire paid a record $106m for a run-of-the-mill Picasso. It is a mad world, reminiscent of the days when rich men would pay thousands of pounds for a single tulip bulb, men who had no love of flowers but who were simply engaged in a form of gambling.

Media dynasties can fizzle out

When Lord Beaverbrook died in 1964, his son Max Aitken inherited his highly successful Daily Express empire. But lacking his father's journalistic flair Aitken allowed the papers to decline and eventually was forced to sell them.

Could the same sort of fate befall the Murdoch papers? Old man Murdoch is getting on for 80 and his son James shows little sign of having inherited his father's Machiavellian gifts. As for the old man's special pride and joy, The Sun, everything suggests that whatever downmarket charms it may once have had these have long since been lost. Previously at election time, the Murdoch-inspired attacks on the old Labour Party at least had an element of crude satire – if one can call it that.

Contrast Thursday's front page with its "drawing" of Cameron headlined "Our Only Hope" and the invitation to readers to vote Tory under the banal heading "In Cameron We Trust". Whatever else that was, it wasn't journalism.

For what it's worth, I myself was finally persuaded to vote Labour by a cartoon in the Murdoch-owned Times showing Gordon Brown with his head stuck in a toilet bowl with the caption "One final heave".

Why would the Pope want to come here?

Exhilarating electrifying, explosive – you can choose your favourite description of those three TV debates which apparently brought the election to life.

I began to wonder whether there may be something the matter with me, because I felt nothing but boredom and missed the third and final debate altogether.

I think the switch-off point came some way into the second debate when a gay questioner in the audience asked if it was right that British taxpayers should pay for the Pope to visit the country, considering not only the sex abuse scandal but the Pontiff's unreconstructed views on all matters sexual.

Each of the three political leaders gave a predictable and almost identical answer. Of course they disagreed with the Pope on a great many issues but they did not think he should be prevented from visiting Britain on that account. So they all appeared progressive and tolerant.

Not for a second did anyone concede that the Pope might not be all that keen to visit Britain in the first place. He is already threatened with demonstrations by militant gays and atheists. Now been given proof that our political leaders are a mealy-mouthed collection, the Pope cannot be blamed if he made his excuses and decided to stay at home.