Brown, Titian and an ‘over-eager’ Tory

Gordon Brown surprised his parliamentary colleagues last month when, in seeking to explain the financial crises, he said: "I'm reminded of the story of Titian [who] reached the age of 90 and said 'I'm finally beginning to learn how to paint,' and that is where we are." That out-of-character analogy - the PM is not known for his knowledge of art history - is now at the centre of a political controversy.

During Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, the Tory leader David Cameron said: "The Prime Minister never gets his facts right: he told us the other day he was like Titian aged 90. The fact is, Titian died at 86."

Neither is in fact true, but it transpires that a Conservative Party worker edited the birth and death dates in the Wikipedia entry for Titian minutes after Cameron sought to embarrass Gordon Brown over the artist's age at PMQs.
 
Records on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, show that at 12.34pm - four minutes after the end of PMQs - the entry for the artist was altered to support Cameron's claim. While previously the artist’s birth and death dates were set at 1485 and 1576, meaning Brown could have been correct, they were changed to 1490 and 1572.

The editor's IP address - the unique string of numbers identifying internet users - belonged to a computer at Conservative campaign headquarters in south-west London. A Conservative Party spokesman said: "It is not our business to change entries in Wikipedia. In this case an over-eager member of staff took it upon himself to put right an incorrect entry."

The fact is, Titian’s exact date of birth is not known. While earlier biographies put his date of birth as early as 1477, contemporary scholars believe it was some time in the late 1480s.

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