But don’t pretend, don’t go all gooey; it won’t wash. Don’t fake a Damascene
moment at which you learn to love Wayne McGregor or the Young Vic, don’t
grandstand it with fatuous tear-jerking speeches written by your aides full
of platitudes about art that you neither believe nor understand – Jeremy
Hunt and Maria Miller made that mistake and were rightly lampooned for it.
Make it clear from the start that it isn’t your job to go into raptures
about Sarah Lucas or Jonas Kaufmann: what you’re charged with is ensuring
that the Arts Council is properly administered and fully functional: this is
what is known as the arm’s length principle, and it is a very important one
that the sneering pundits sometimes forget.

So in some sense I would counsel you to steer clear of the arts: governments
have no business poking its nose into what is good and bad in the aesthetic
realm – leave that to Putin and his kind. I would think you have two better
alternatives. Either find a bright young ambitious MP who does have an
authentically rich cultural life (surely, surely the Conservative Party can
drum up a couple of those?) and get Cameron to appoint him or her as Arts
Minister in place of Ed Vaizey, who has been too long in the job. Lecturing
the Arts Council aside, the duties are light, mostly related to attending
champagne-soused gallery openings and applauding the musical efforts of
primary schools.

Or perhaps you could abolish the post altogether: you can sign off the Arts
Council budget yourself, and minor functions such as the supervision of
export bans on works of art can be delegated to committees or underlings. It
might save a million or two, who knows? A larger debate might question the
merit of having a DCMS at all (you have belonged to a groupuscule which
seems to favour this option), but let’s put a moratorium on that for the
moment.

If you’re just planning to keep buggering on – and that seems to be the way
now that a general election is only a year or so away – and if you don’t
want to leave the job with egg on your face, here, as a long-serving denizen
of the culture zone, is what I’d recommend.

Once a year you are obliged to write to the Chairman of the Arts Council,
enclosing a cheque but also setting out the government’s priorities and
wishes – don’t spend it all on sweets, that sort of thing. Here is an NGO
whose budget and establishment has been so viciously cut that it is now
scarcely fit for purpose: the remaining staff spend their whole time
fire-fighting rather than making informed assessments of particular cases,
and valuable expertise has been lost. This is tragic: the Arts Council is
pointless unless it hears and heeds the voices of people who know, practise
and understand their art forms in depth.

I would like to think that you would urge the cutting of red tape,
form-filling and box-ticking; I would hope that you would also recommend
more reliance on pro bono panels, made up of those with the wisdom and
experience to make informed and cultured decisions – the job of the ACE’s
central executive board being to locate such people. Too much money is being
frittered away in administration and compliance: more of the kitty needs to
pass directly to the art and the artists, with a focus on reasonably priced
tickets and ease of access.

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The regions aren’t getting a fair share of the meagre cake. This doesn’t mean
that London should be getting less – its major institutions are by and large
magnificently successful, crown jewels of the nation, which must be
cherished and sustained – but it does mean that more sources of cash must be
unlocked, particularly in the north. Local industries, businesses and
entrepreneurs must be encouraged to do their civic bit, perhaps by tax
breaks, perhaps by some sort of mandate (as is the case in other parts of
Europe).

Which brings me to the question of the Treasury, whose mandarins are said to
be unsympathetic to the idea of state subsidy of the arts. You just need to
hammer away on this one. It’s not rocket surgery. Reports repeatedly confirm
that the relatively small amount of money of tax revenue (currently about
£600 million) annually granted to the Arts Council represents an excellent
investment in our “creative industries”. It stimulates tourism and urban
renegeration: where there are theatres, concert halls and galleries, the
high-spending middle classes will follow, distributing money to restaurants,
hotels, car parks and keeping city centres alive in the evenings. Talent
fostered by subsidy has made us world leaders and contributed gross and net
to exports.

Beyond such bean counting, the arts are indubitably crucial to our national
self-respect, and fundamental to what conservatives believe about public
life. They foster a sense of who we are and what we stand for; they turn
animal existence into meaningful life. Examine what Turner Contemporary has
done for Margate; imagine the centre of Birmingham without Symphony Hall or
the Hippodrome. Man does not live be retail opportunities alone, does he, Mr
Javid?

Others will make windier claims: they will preach that through “community
projects” the arts can make the evil turn from wickedness, the lame to walk
and the destitute to sing. This sort of thing should not be central to the
Arts Council’s mission (the Lottery can deal with it), any more than the
vexed question of role of the arts in the school curriculum (which is one
for Michael Gove to thrash out). The Arts Council is not a branch of the
social services or an adjunct to the education system: it is there to foster
good art.

I fondly imagine you will agree with much of this; what concerns you is how we
can pay for it at a time when we desperately need to curb public spending.
George Osborne hasn’t so far been excessively hard on the arts compared to
other sectors, and tax breaks for donors are now much better than they were,
but we still have a long way to go before we have grown an American style
“culture of giving”. I’m not sure we want one anyway: it requires a huge
amount of administration and is so unpredictable in its yield that it makes
long-term planning almost impossible. That one-off grant to which all have
contributed – as we all contribute to the national health or defence of the
realm – is in most respects a far more efficient model. The extent to which
Lottery funds can be tapped for revenue is a matter which I think you should
approach gingerly: the ethics are complex and you risk ending up with a
muddle.

But it should immediately concern you that there is such a chronic shortage of
good fund-raisers, and so few opportunities to train them. Smaller
organisations, especially those beyond the magic circle of the M25, are
crippled by this dearth. Nor, despite the best efforts of the invaluable
Clore Leadership Programme, are there enough young managers being trained up
to keep the boats sailing in choppy cultural waters on an even keel. As you
will soon learn as you traverse your new domain, Mr Javid, people like Nick
Starr of the National Theatre and Alex Beard of Tate and the Royal Opera
House are every bit as important to their organisations as their more
celebrated front-men “creatives”, combining as they do a passionate
commitment to high art with a sharp eye on the spread sheets.

One thing I can assure you, Mr Javid, is that it’s all very interesting.
Whatever your personal tastes, the question of the government’s
responsibility towards the arts raise great political issues. Take them
seriously and you will never be bored.

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