Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov, we are told, has ordered the removal from the walls of the ministry of portraits of his 46 predecessors. The stated reason is a noble one, on the face of it.

Dyankov wants to promote Bulgarian artists, and plans to hang their works in place of the bean-counters-in-chief of yore. The first exhibit is already there, Georgi Baev’s The Sea (one might have thought that something portraying the theme of "all at sea" would have been more appropriate, but hopefully those days left along with the 46 former ministers).

Reportedly, the earnest features of the illustrious predecessors have been dispatched to a museum, though which one was not clear from the report that I read, although hopefully we could exclude Earth and Man (geology, and no remarks about ministers of finance and hearts of stone) or Natural History (taxidermy and formaldehyde; but in decades past, it was Bulgaria’s finances that were left stuffed, not the finance ministers themselves).

Out of sight, out of mind. Political history is littered with episodes in which people in overalls are summoned to take things down, unscrew plaques, airlift or otherwise cart away statues or, in more extreme cases, press the plunger on a detonator – the latter, in the case of late communist dictator Georgi Dimitrov’s tomb, more than once.

Perhaps it is salutary to have the corridors of power, for once to use that term in the most literal sense, free of Those Who Have Gone Before. No one to point a finger at: "The deficit? That one", "Failure of tax reform? That one".

One can only wonder what temptations there are for Barack Obama in the White House, especially as he strides by some of the more recent, if not the most recent addition, to the collection of portraits of presidents past. It is said that Nixon had late-night conversations with portraits, Lincoln reportedly being a favourite interlocutor for such, well, monologues.

In one of many delightful scenes in Love Actually, Hugh Grant as the occupant of Number 10 turns to a painting of Margaret Thatcher to ask, "Did you ever have this problem?".
Dyankov has deprived himself of this choice; he would be, literally, talking to a wall, but perhaps would not be the first Finance Minister to have that feeling.

Then again, portraits of former finance ministers are not often a happy topic. In 2009, in what was described as an act of "guerrilla art", two paintings depicting Ireland’s Brian Cowen, then prime minister but formerly a finance minister, were sneaked into a gallery; a strange enough thing to do, but stranger that both showed what the artists imagined Cowen looked like in the nude.

In his stated ambition of showing off art on the walls of his ministry, I am quite sure that this is not what Dyankov had in mind. Five months after Dyankov got the keys to the treasury, Standard&Poor’s upgraded Bulgaria’s outlook from "negative" to "stable". If there is anything that finance ministers do not like, it is that word "instability", and so perhaps, it would be wiser to offer visitors and staff the prospect of everything from restful pastoral landscapes to cutting-edge, intellectually challenging avante-garde stuff, but certainly not any interpretations of what his forerunners looked like with a shortfall of shorts.

Some years ago, a band called 10CC produced a song which had the lines, "Art for art’s sake – money, for God’s sake". May I suggest that this be put on the PABX of the Finance Ministry?

It may prove inspiring.