Minister taunts America's stay-away stars

Kim Howells, the tourism minister, said stars such as Tom Cruise were belying their swashbuckling screen image by being too scared to board transatlantic flights to Europe.

Hard-man actors were more frightened of flying than "grannies from New York", Mr Howells added.

He said the failure of stars like Cruise - well-known for action movies like Minority Report, Top Gun and Mission: Impossible - to travel was damaging the British tourist industry because they offered a lead to other travellers from the United States.

Mr Howells argued: "These people portray themselves as great action heroes and although we know they use stuntmen all the time, one would assume they would have the balls to do a simple thing like fly to Europe and set an example for the rest of the nation."

Mr Howells made the characteristically outspoken remarks as he prepared to fly out to the US yesterday on a six-day trip during which he hopes to persuade more Americans to visit Britain.

Although the UK tourism industry has largely recovered from the downturns of the foot-and-mouth outbreak and 11 September attacks, American tourists have been the slowest to return.

Figures for the first three months of this year show that visits to the UK from the US are still 14 per cent down on 2001 and 9 per cent down on last year.

Americans tend to be the biggest spenders when they do visit, and their continued absence is having a disproportionate effect on tourist revenues. Scotland is among the worst-affected because of the high number of big-spending Americans coming north, although new figures released last week suggested that the worst has passed, and that tourist numbers in Scotland are again edging up.

Mr Howells said: "With the summer holiday season fast approaching, now is the time to tell the US we are ready to welcome them and have much to offer."

In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September hijackings in 2001, Hollywood’s hard men showed themselves just as timid as their fans over returning to the skies in passenger jets.

Bruce Willis, the star of Die Hard, pulled out of a visit to the London Film Festival while Arnold Schwarzenegger terminated a planned trip to his Austrian homeland. They were following in the footsteps of Sylvester Stallone, who cancelled his trip to Cannes in 1986 for fear of terrorist reprisals following the US bombing of Libya.

However, the line-up at this year’s Cannes festival shows that Mr Howells’ outburst may be slightly out-of-date.

Concerns that the war in Iraq and continuing terrorist alerts would scare off Hollywood’s finest have not been realised with a string of A-list celebrities crossing the Atlantic for the annual festival in the South of France.

Keanu Reeves, Kevin Costner, Nicole Kidman and Meg Ryan have all flown in and Clint Eastwood is due to put in an appearance later this week. Schwarzenegger has also apparently overcome his earlier misgivings to make a visit to publicise Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Tom Cruise, the star singled out for criticism by Mr Howells, was not at Cannes to accompany his girlfriend Penelope Cruz on the red carpet, but that was because he is currently filming in New Zealand.

A Cannes festival spokeswoman said: "I do not know what this man is talking about because we have many big American stars here. If there are less American stars than previous years, that is simply because more of the films in competition this year are European. Every star who has been invited to Cannes is here."

Mr Howells will visit New York and Chicago to promote Britain as a tourist destination and begin a 2 million advertising campaign organised by the UK’s national tourism body VisitBritain.

His mauling of Hollywood stars follows a series of undiplomatic outbursts during his tenure as culture minister. In December 2001, he apologised for saying that listening to folk music was his idea of hell and last year he famously described the offerings of modern art competing for the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".

His own paintings, of a more traditional nature, were then subjected to detailed appraisal and found wanting by many art critics.

Rap music and violent video games have also felt the sharp edge of Mr Howells’ tongue.

However, Tony Blair’s official spokesman defended Mr Howells yesterday, saying the Prime Minister was happy for his culture minister to take on the titans of Hollywood in his role of promoting Britain abroad. "You can’t criticise ministers on the one hand for being programmed automatons and on the other take issue if they say things that perhaps are a little bit more interesting than usual," the spokesman said.