Norman Lebrecht

The new CEO of the Arts Council has been announced – Guardianistas won’t be happy

It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries.

Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the LSO – ACE has burgeoned into a mighty quango that distributes £1.9 billion of public cash and £1.1 billion of lottery money over three years. It feeds not only the performing arts but museums, galleries, monuments, public libraries, poetry and pottery. It is a nanny state in miniature which, over the past generation, has become an executive arm of government policy in promoting multicultural equivalence, sexual equality, general dumbing down and political correctness at every turn of the wind. Its greatest triumph was the parading of a mechanical elephant through the streets of London at a cost of £1 million.

When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he stacked the Arts Council with new Labour donors and flunkeys. His first chairman was the Irish entrepreneur Gerry Robinson, who had downgraded ITV’s content to a point of common idiocy and the company to near-ruin. The secretary-general, or chief executive, was Peter Hewitt, a Labour lackey from the North East who, having funnelled cash and angels to his home region, went on to run a London health charity, a quango man to his cuticles.

Hewitt was succeeded by Alan Davey, a senior civil servant at the Department of Culture Media and Sports, who, told he would rise no higher in Whitehall, was helped by his minister, James Purnell, into the Arts Council seat. The Keynsian arms-length principle went out of the window as Davey turned ACE into a New Labour rubber-stamp, aided and abetted by true-pink chairmen, Christopher Frayling and Liz Forgan.

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