OASIS have released a 25th anniversary disk of the album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, complete with “previously unseen” photographs including one of Liam Gallagher lying on his back at the Griffith Observatory in LA in 1994.

I’m told that there is a froideur between him and his brother and former bandmate, Noel. I’ll let Liam take up the account about this photograph. “That’s Brian Cannon not me. I rest my case who ever is in charge of this Oasis s*** show resign I can do better blindfolded I’m looking for a new job BUMBACLART” (sic). Cannon was the album designer, the rest is a mystery.

It put me in mind of other cases of mistaken identity. There was the day when the BBC interviewed, quite literally, the wrong Guy. Guy Goma was waiting in reception to be interviewed about a job as an accountant and was mistaken for Guy Kewney, who was there about a legal dispute between Apple computers and the Beatles’ former label Apple, about which the first Guy knew not a jot. He was quite convincing live on air. But not later when he was interviewed about what he came for. He didn’t get it.

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite but when his brother, Ludwig, died newspapers believed it was him. One headline ran: “The Merchant of Death is Dead.” Wanting to repair his name, he willed a large chunk of his wealth to create the Nobel Prizes. Last week, for the first time, two women – Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna – shared the chemistry prize for something about splitting DNA which is too complicated for me to understand.

In 2016, an Egyptian court tried and convicted Ahmed Mansour Qorany Sharara for his part in a 2014 triple homicide. Never mind that he was actually three at the time of his conviction, which would have made him 16 months old when he committed the crime. It turns out the real offender was a 16-year-old with the same name. Doesn’t surprise me about the military dictatorship in Egypt. They deported me, but that’s another story.

The former Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins was locked up for 35 years for multiple and gross cases of paedophilia, prompting torrents of online abuse (although how they thought it would reach him in the nick I don’t know). Much of it went to Steps singer Ian H Watkins after an online showbiz magazine with a five million circulation used his photo to accompany the story. There is much to slate Steps about but this was one step too far.

There’s also the up-to-date case of the former reality TV star living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who is repeatedly mistaken for the President.

Fruitful art

IF I nail a jelly to a wall is it, apart from immensely difficult, art? No? But a banana taped to one in a gallery apparently is. Moreover it’s one that cost £92,000, although by now I expect it’s dribbling down the brickwork as smelly mush.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York has just been gifted the work which sold at an art fair last year. Well, not exactly the work – a piece of paper from the creator, Maurizio Cattelan, a certificate of authenticity giving the museum the right to recreate it and exactly how to do so, like it should be hung 175cm above the ground and the direction it should be pointing.

It didn’t even come with the banana, never mind the duct tape. Any old banana would do. So if a curator felt peckish at the end of the day he or she could munch the art work and bring in a new one in the morning.

The Cattelan piece is called Comedian and Maurizio must be laughing all the way to the NatWest, or in his case probably UniCredit. The Italian clearly enjoys taking the excreta out of the art world and rich collectors. In 2016, he installed the 18-carat gold, functioning toilet in the Guggenheim, titled America – surely a passing comment on the super-rich?

The Guggenheim entered into the spirit of satire. When Donald Trump asked to borrow a Van Gogh it refused, but offered America instead. Trump knocked it back. Some time later someone knocked off America and the golden loo has no doubt been melted down and sold on.

Wartime civility

YOU cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

A calumny, of course, by Humbert Wolfe, one of the most popular authors of the 1920s, but also an extremely senior civil servant. There’s not much more known about Wolfe, other than that he died on his 55th birthday in 1940. He claimed to have no political creed, except that “money and its possessors should be abolished”, which surely made him either an anarchist or a raging red.

This came to mind when I received a missive from editor Andrew Jaspan, now a resident of the convict colony of Australia. Jaspan was editor of The Scotsman and also the creator of the Sunday Herald, this newspaper’s precursor, among other triumphs. I never tire of retelling the stories of how he was hit in the face by a thrown fish supper cycling home in Edinburgh and also when he got locked in a toilet for four hours when there was an awards ceremony going on?

After editing The Age in Melbourne he set up the brilliant online portal The Conversation, which melds academic specialisms and journalism – translated, it’s getting journalists to make geekspeak intelligible to the average human.

There’s a great story in a recent edition about another senior civil servant called George Steward, a 1930s Dominic Cummings or Alastair Campbell, who was the go-between framing Neville Chamberlain’s catastrophic 1938 Munich Agreement between Britain and the Nazis. “Peace for our times” proclaimed Nev – and we were at war almost before the ink had dried on the document.

Steward was spotted by MI5 in the dead of night sneaking into the German embassy in London. But more than

that – he was the one who introduced

the anonymous lobby briefings, that all government policy came through his lips. As lobby rules required, hacks reported what Steward said without attribution, conveying the impression that it was an unalloyed fact.

And he was extremely successful in persuading Fleet Street about the appeasement policy although papers like the Daily Mail didn’t need much convincing.

Steward was the spin doctor’s spin doctor and he triumphed over the Foreign Office which was totally against giving in to Hitler.

Not much is known about him. He was 5ft9 and the MI5 field agent who watched him approach the German embassy noted that he wore a homburg and a dark grey suit with narrow-cut trousers. He also had a light grey tweed overcoat and walked with his feet turned out, a sort of early duck walk.

As it turned out, Steward’s opposite number at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was much more prescient. He wrote at the time that the agreement would confirm “the [Nazi] extremists in power, and in some bogus settlement which will be the beginning of the end of the British empire, chloroformed as it will be by a totally false impression of security”.