Steve McQueen tackles Brown on stamps

Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is attempting to enlist the support of Gordon Brown in his long-running campaign to honour British servicemen killed in Iraq by having their faces printed on postage stamps. This evening he will meet the Prime Minister in Downing Street to put his case for the idea, which has, thus far, fallen on deaf ears at the Royal Mail.

In an interview in the Independent, McQueen said: "The insulting thing is - and no disrespect to Sid James and Barbara Windsor - that the Carry On films are now going on stamps. These people died for Queen and country so surely they should appear on a stamp as a portrait? They should be visible. I don’t understand it."

McQueen, whose film Hunger, about IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes this year, is likely to give the PM an earful, at least if the Independent’s interviewer Hannah Duguid’s depiction of him is accurate. She concluded her piece thus: "After 45 minutes of prickly conversation, I can’t get away from him fast enough."