The past week has provided an interesting education in what you mustn't say in public. You may not, if you are a lord, say that you have had a lamentable experience of being nursed in an NHS hospital. You should not, if you are a prince home from a contentious conflict, say that army rations are “miserable”. And you oughtn't, if you are culture secretary, to include in your speech a paragraph that reads as follows: “The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms, but it is true of many others - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this.” We'll try to decode that somewhat gnomic passage in a minute.

Meanwhile, to return to the wider subject of the unspeakable, it makes no difference that what you say may be true. NHS patients and their relations who are not nobly born give shattering interviews in the Daily Mail on a weekly basis complaining of their vile treatment in hospital without, as far as one knows, being rebuked for it by David Cameron. A contributer to the Times Online debate about army rations, who seemed to be a veteran of Afghanistan, observed that even the voracious Afghan mice habitually spurn the repulsive British army rations.

And although few people who actually like music can sit through the last night of the Proms (which is presumably what the Culture Secretary, Margaret Hodge, had in mind when she launched her syntactically approximate missile against the entire institution) without breaking into a light sweat of dismay at the spectacle, Downing Street nevertheless found it necessary to distance itself from Mrs Hodge's remarks with the assertion that the Proms are a “wonderful, democratic and quintessentially British Institution”. Which they are. Except for the lamentable last night.

Oh, no, they aren't. Oh, yes, they are ... Hang on, here's David Cameron again, in a touching moment of solidarity with the Prime Minister: “We want more things where people actually come together and celebrate Britishness ... This is a classic example of a Labour politician not really getting the things that people like to do to celebrate culture, identity and a great British institution.”

The thing that I'm not getting, but about which Gordon Brown, Margaret Hodge and David Cameron are singing in gloriously ungrammatical harmony, is the notion that culture - which I'd always imagined to be the organic product of a multiplicity of individual artists' sensibilities - has somehow a primary political duty, both to form and celebrate our national identity. I can think of various political regimes under which that has been the aesthetic criterion, but they tend not to be 21st-century liberal democracies.

“Trust a culture secretary to imagine that the arts are politics with added twiddly bits,” said I to my editor when I read the reports of Mrs Hodge's speech. “Of course, it doesn't strike her that you can't formulate a policy for a national cultural identity any more than you can formulate one for an individual work of art. It's an organic process, not a manifesto pledge.”

Now, this is what happens when you read only the reported highlights of a speech. Turning to the website of the Institute of Public Policy Research think-tank, where the full text is to be found, I discovered the following sentence: “The formation of a cultural identity is an organic process and one that should not be prescribed in detail from above by government, even if we could.” This would be more reassuring if the words “in detail” had been omitted.

Still, Mrs Hodge's proposition that cultural institutions have a political function in forming a sense of national identity is a notion that has preoccupied governments across the centuries: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain a century later, on a more modest scale the wonderful School Prints initiative of the 1940s, are all successful examples of the way in which the complicated abstract premise can take concrete form. Nor is the idea of interest only to government apparatchiks. In the current Royal Academy magazine, the academician Christopher Le Brun notes: “National identity in art is interesting and not much discussed here.” While living in Berlin in the 1980s, he found that German artists' “relationship with their nationality fuelled their art, quite naturally. I think they were puzzled at the way the English remain at arm's-length from their culture.”

Maybe one reason for that is the squeamish relationship that arts ministers seem to maintain with their portfolio. While Mrs Hodge stresses the point that culture offers us the opportunity to explore an imaginative world beyond our own experience, her list of cultural totems is random and uneasy. Looking forward to the celebrations next year of Henry VIII's accession, she remarks: “Given some of the less savoury parts of his reign, it's not an obviously straightforward event to commemorate.” I'd love to pause and unpick that assertion, but I have not space enough, nor time, so must pass straight to the Culture Secretary's list of “cultural and heritage icons”, which include “the Angel of the North, the British Museum, Wembley Stadium, the television and radio programmes we enjoy, from Coronation Street to The Archers”.

From Eileen Grimshaw to Jennifer Archer is not the most ambitious of cultural journeys. Mrs Hodge is right about the power of art to draw people together, and all around her are bold examples of it in action, from BBC Two's series The Choir to the RSC's recommendation that children should be taught Shakespeare from the age of 4. A disappointment, then, that her ideas should seem so timid and constrained. Still, no discussion about the role of the arts is entirely unhelpful, and perhaps Mrs Hodge's speech will be the catalyst for a bolder and more imaginative debate than her present, strangely tentative, vision of British culture.

Keith, the face of (luxury) leather
One of the cultural icons unaccountably missing from Mrs Hodge's list is the great Keith Richards, whose latest artistic enterprise is an advertisement for Louis Vuitton baggage. It features the old National Treasure perched on a bed in a plush hotel room, looking decoratively wrecked and nursing a stupendously fancy guitar. On the carpet by the half-open door there sits what looks mysteriously like a small casserole (room service too awed by the Presence to bring in his steaming order of hotpot, presumably). Even more mysterious is the appearance, atop the massive Vuitton suitcase containing (we have to assume) the great man's toothbrush and slippers, of a large hardback book with a substantial magnifying glass artlessly abandoned between its pages. It's all very enigmatic and now I can't stop thinking about the ad - which is doubtless exactly what Vuitton's director of communications had in mind.

Problem is, I couldn't care less about the suitcase. All I want to know is, what on earth is old Keef reading? And why doesn't he just wear his reading specs on a chain round his neck, like the other great rock monsters of his vintage?

Ale and eel at the Vic
The thought of hotpot leads me inexorably back to Coronation Street and the news that ITV hopes to roll out a franchise of Rovers Returns. This won't do at all for me: I'm an EastEnders girl. If I'm going to a soap-themed pub for my absinthe-and-it, it'll have to be a Queen Vic clone. Which leads me to catering matters, in which the Vic is definitely at a disadvantage. Beside the packets of crisps that Shirley is forever vengefully rustling, the only food ever to appear in the Vic is finger buffets for parties - and they aren't meant for eating, only for people to fall into when the inevitable fight breaks out. I sense a gap in the market here: Peggy's jellied eel special, perhaps?

Times Recommends

• A new kind of western conservatism
• Georgiana is the wrong role model
• Alaska, where cops don't bother you