Grand statements from the Tory party this week, when Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, announced the new policy to merge English Heritage with the Heritage Lottery Fund. But hang on, haven’t we heard that somewhere before? A little digging reveals that the idea has been pinched from the Liberal Democrats, outlined as it was in their policy document produced for the conference season. In the same speech, Hunt also seemed to compare Labour’s attitude to culture to Stalin and Mao’s attempts to rewrite Russian and Chinese history. Which seems a little over the top.

This week saw the nominations for the 2009 British Independent Film Awards. BBC Films dominated, with 26 contenders spread across films including Fish Tank, the most nominated individual film with eight nods, Lone Scherfig’s An Education and Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop with six each, and Jane Campion’s Bright Star with four. Also up for gongs are Moon, with seven nominations and Nowhere Boy with six. Last year’s winner of best film, best director and best newcomer (for the actor Dev Patel) was a cute little film called Slumdog Millionaire, which you may have heard of. Will this set the Oscar bandwagon rolling again for British film?

After last week’s furore from “real” writers over the proliferation of the ghostwritten celebrity novel, injury was nearly added to insult as around 2,000 fans rioted in a branch of W H Smith where Katie Price aka Jordan — whose novel Crystal outsold the entire Booker shortlist in 2007 — was signing copies of her new tome, Standing Out: My Look, My Style, My Life. Books went flying, magazines littered the floor, and staff were left with hours of cleaning up. Price managed to remain standing out, however, but that probably had something to do with her retinue of 25 bodyguards.

Here’s Stanley! Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining tops Total Sci-Fi’s pre-Hallowe’en list of the 100 greatest horror movies. Which is ironic, seeing as Stephen King — who wrote the original novel — thought that it was less than exemplary of its genre. Kubrick “set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre”, King said at the time. “I would do everything different.” He did do everything different, in fact, in his own plodding 1997 adaptation — which so far has not troubled this, or any other, top 100 list.

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WIT AND WISDOM

“I buy diamonds on a very regular basis, but now I’m selling my old stuff before I get something new. These are times when we can learn about the value of money.” Even multimillionaire rapper 50 Cent is hit by the recession

FEUD’S CORNER: X FACTOR v CHINA

Noisy, litter-dropping X Factor fans have so enraged the Chinese Ambassador, Madam Fu Ying (who lives next door to the house ITV uses for the finalists), that she has filed an official complaint. Evidently John and Edward have failed to charm her.

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