The sisterhood is set for a bruising over who next chairs the Arts Council. Applications are closed, and it’s looking like a tussle between two very good friends and fellow feminists - Liz Forgan and Helena Kennedy.

Both are well qualified for the job, which becomes vacant early next year with the retirement of Christopher Frayling. Forgan chaired the Heritage Lottery Fund for seven years, until last week, and still runs the Scott Trust, which oversees The Guardian and The Observer. Kennedy, a leading human-rights lawyer and Labour peer, is a former chairwoman of the British Council, a current trustee of the British Museum and also chairwoman of Arts & Business.

But a bloke could upset the applecart. The wealthy businessman Patrick McKenna, once right-hand man to Andrew Lloyd Webber before setting up Ingenious, which advises and invests in the creative industries, is thought to have thrown his hat into the ring. He also chairs the Young Vic.

Refuseniks for the post, which should be decided by Christmas, include John Tusa, former managing director of the Barbican. He tells me the council is too beholden to the department for culture. So much for that “arm’s length” principle.

“Lucian [Freud] is the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford[. . .] He looks like Harpo Marx.” Thus wrote the poet Stephen Spender of our leading artist, who once painted his portrait. He was not to know that Freud has another Harpo Marx characteristic, at least in regard to the media: he does not talk to them.

A fascinating exhibition is opening this week in central London of Freud’s early works, including the one of Spender, done when Freud was just 17. David Dawson, curator of the exhibition at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery, had hoped also to show an early 1950s portrait Freud did of the book dealer Bernard Breslauer. However, Dawson has concluded that Breslauer destroyed it because he hated how he had been portrayed. I wonder if the Queen wishes she could burn Freud’s hardly flattering portrait of her?

With the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest under way, so too is a film about his tragic death. The Brazilian-born director Henrique Goldman has been filming on the quiet in London for a month.

The movie is as much about Brazilians in London as it is about the dreadful shooting of the innocent de Menezes. “It’s not a film about the Met’s mistakes as such, but of course it has much to do with his death,” Stephen Frears, its executive producer, tells me. The production team travels soon to Brazil for more filming.

The BBC had planned its own film about de Menezes, but chickened out. The corporation is wimpish about dramas based on real events, so now Channel 4 is carrying that flag. Coming soon are its dramas about the death of the British peace activist Tom Hurndall in Gaza and a remarkable story about preliminary talks in the 1980s on ending apartheid in South Africa. The discussions, involving leading blacks, were held in a Wiltshire country house, of all places.

I went to the Turner Prize exhibition, where the mediocre standard has almost turned me into a supporter of the Stuckists. In a room after the exhibition are boards where the public can give their views. Reading them, Mark Leckey has the most support. I wonder if visitors know that Leckey is professor of film studies at the same German institute as one of the Turner judges, Daniel Birnbaum. Surely that represents a conflict of interest?

The Royal Court is currently staging a fine play, Now or Later, based on the family crisis of a (fictional) president-elect of the United States. Written by the American playwright Christopher Shinn and starring Eddie Redmayne, so good too as Angel Clare in BBC1’s Tess, this political and moral drama is deservedly being extended until November 1. However, it has one serious drawback - its title. First, I cannot see why it is called that. Second, that title is so forgettable. What was it again?

richard.brooks@sunday-times.co.uk

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