David Hare’s notebook: The National Theatre belongs to taxpayers, not corporate sponsors

The nicest day of the year was spent at Charleston in May. The Sussex farmhouse shared by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell looked splendid in the streaming sunshine. As a dramatist, I’ve idly disparaged bald and white-haired audiences. But as soon as I started speaking at the literary festival, I realised that everyone in panama hats and cardigans was way to the left of me. The first question was about my local childhood, and I said that growing up so close to the Channel meant that stories of people like Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf sitting on English lawns and hearing the sound of battle in the first world war from across the water had always moved me. When I added that you couldn’t be born in Sussex without feeling profoundly European — and that a historical hostility to Europe therefore mystified me — I was cheered to the rafters. An odd inversion of the expected state of affairs: the oldest generation is now the most progressive.

In France, where constitutions are taken seriously, protocol says that the director of the Comédie-Française is the 25th most important person in the land. At the president’s state dinners he or she must be seated appropriately. I had always imagined that the Poet Laureate was an official position, not conveying power, but conferring status. Apparently not. When Chris Grayling instituted his vindictive policy of forbidding outsiders to send prisoners books, he refused to take a meeting with Carol Ann Duffy. His motives were clear. The poor guy doesn’t have a shred of an argument and he can’t face expertise. But why, constitutionally, was Grayling allowed to get away with it? If ministers feel obliged courteously to take advice from the Queen’s son, why do they feel free to insult the Queen’s poet?

Further evidence that I’m going soft in the head is that I find myself agreeing with a critic.