Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative shadow culture, media and sport secretary, has been making all the “right” Beeb-bashing noises recently. However, I hear that the smart MP has a rival for his portfolio once the Tories, presumably, take over next year.

John Whittingdale, Lady T’s political secretary 20 years ago, has, for the past four years, chaired the Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. My snout assures me he’s very keen on the cabinet post as culture secretary. I’d like to think Ed Vaizey, the shadow arts minister, would still be a shoo-in for that ministerial brief. Rarely have I known an MP with such an obvious passion for culture, though I wonder if David Cameron might think he has gone too native. Sometimes Ed can be spotted running from a play to an art gallery, then on to a cinema, all in the same evening. Perhaps, too, Dave would have liked him to bang on a bit about scrapping some arts quangos, even the Arts Council itself.

Mind you, all this might be irrelevant if the Tories decide the Department for Culture, Media and Sport itself should be disbanded as an efficiency measure. They might argue that the culture, sport and media bits could be subsumed elsewhere in Whitehall. Submerged, more likely.

Talking of politics, I had a decidedly Paxman-like chat with Gail Rebuck, the Random House boss, at the (excellent, I thought) Man Booker prize bash. How are Tony Blair’s memoirs going, I asked. “I’ll let you know when he’s written them,” she replied. So you mean he’s not started? “Oh, no, he’s done some of it.” So when will it be published? “When he’s finished them.” Brilliant, Gail. Circumspection worthy of the canniest politician.

The London Film Festival opens on Wednesday. I’ll recommend the haunting The White Ribbon, which took the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year; Glorious 39, from Stephen Poliakoff, which tells the little-known story of the appeasers intent on spying on, and pressurising to the point of suicide, those in the Churchill camp; and Tales from the Golden Age (an ironic title), set in Romania just before Ceausescu was overthrown — the first two of its five stories are brilliantly sardonic. Not yet seen is Nowhere Boy, the festival’s closing-night film, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood. The artist’s first feature looks at the young John Lennon and shows the tussle for his affection between his aunt Mimi, in whose house he lived, and his mother, Julia, who was considered unsuitable to bring up her boy after an affair. Mimi always resented Julia, because she was their father’s favourite.

Philip Norman, whose brilliant if controversial Lennon biography came out last year, argued that the teenager had sexual fantasies about his mother and a near-incestuous relationship with her once they were reunited. Unsurprisingly, this Oedipal notion was denounced by Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, the keeper of his flame. Since her memoirs form the basis of the film, I’ll be watching carefully to see how the mother/son love is portrayed.

You normally go to HMV to buy a DVD of a movie. But from October 23, HMV Wimbledon will be showing films, just like a cinema, on three smallish screens. The top floor has been converted following a deal with the Curzon group, which owns cinemas such as the Curzon Mayfair, as well as Artificial Eye, the distributor of classy, mainly foreign films. With an Odeon nearby, the Wimbledon HMV will show more art-house fare — though also some mainstream movies. I hope the experiment works. Anything to get people into cinemas rather than watching movies, many of them pirated, on TVs or PCs at home.

The Everyman in north London is also trying to woo people out of their houses. Having converted its cinema in Hampstead to a luxury screen with lounge seating — and higher prices — it has done the same with the former Screen on the Hill in nearby Belsize Park. You can even get an upmarket snack delivered to your seat, which should be less noisy than the ubiquitous crunching of popcorn.

Suitably high prices for the very best seats at the Noël Coward Theatre in the West End when Enron moves there in the new year. Suitable, in that the play is all about the perils of rampant capitalism. Even so, £74 a seat is the most I’ve heard of for a drama, albeit one with musical aspirations.

richard.brooks@sunday-times.co.uk