What does it take to make a secretary of state for culture? In Whitehall, the argument goes that just as we don’t expect the minister for agriculture to keep chickens or know how to drive a combine harvester, we shouldn’t insist on a minister for culture who divides his free time between the National Theatre and the drum kit he keeps in his bedroom. Enthusiasm, even expertise, have nothing to do with it, and those who believe otherwise are just silly, sentimental fools (precisely the kind of silly, sentimental fools, in fact, who are always at the National Theatre, sobbing at Shakespeare or the new James Graham).
“One of the extraordinary things about cabinet reshuffles is that nobody is ever asked what they’d like to do or where their skills might lead them,” says Nicky Morgan, briskly, when I ask her what qualities are required in a culture secretary, a position she held between July 2019 and February 2020. “If you go into politics saying I want to be X or Y, you’re going to be disappointed.” In her eyes, a minister simply learns on the job, taking advice from their officials, and no one is ultimately any the worse for it. Her instincts were, and are, nakedly party political, the jostling around the cabinet table of far more interest to her even today – she now sits in the House of Lords – than the travails of the Royal Opera House, not least because, as she lets slip, she doesn’t believe many Conservative votes are to be found among its audience. (“Do they [vote Conservative] though?” she asks, when I suggest that some of those sitting in the ROH’s dress circle may be Tories.)
But not all politicians go along with this. Some can still remember a time when the door at the department of culture (currently the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) did not revolve quite so fast as it does now; a time when passion and knowledge were not only useful, but a prerequisite for the job. “Of course those things matter,” says her fellow peer Chris Smith. In 1997, when Labour won its landslide, the new prime minister, Tony Blair, asked Smith, a well-known lover of art, poetry and opera, to be his culture secretary – a request that came as a surprise, given that he’d spent the election campaign standing outside hospitals as the shadow health secretary. But for him it was a perfect fit: a job he was both well-equipped to do, and which he considered to be of deep and abiding importance to the state of the nation.
(February 1, 2023) Lucy Frazer
Already longer in the job than her predecessor, Frazer has still had little time to affect the flailing arts sector for better or worse. We know she wants a female James Bond, but she admitted on a podcast that she no longer reads many books, and (gasp) hasn’t finished Succession.
High point Announcing a £58m cultural investment fund for regional arts organisations.
Low point Parroted her predecessors’ claim that the BBC is biased, but refused to say how.
(September 1, 2022) Michelle Donelan
Not only the shortest-serving culture secretary to date, Donelan already held the record for the briefest stint as a cabinet minister in parliamentary history: 36 hours as Boris Johnson’s education secretary in July 2022.
High point Scrapping Nadine Dorries’s plan to privatise Channel 4.
Low point Not scrapping Nadine Dorries’s plan to abolish the licence fee after 2027.
(September 1, 2021) Nadine Dorries
Since becoming an MP, Dorries has been a prolific writer of pulp period sagas, most recently A Wicked Woman, out next year. She’s no stranger to TV, having appeared on everything from Celebrity Chase to The Junk Food Experiment, not to mention I’m a Celebrity… in 2012, which earned her £82,000 and a brief removal of the Tory whip.
High point Her rap video about the new Ofcom regulations, including the immortal rhyme: “Is it true it will impact freedom of expression? No! We’ve put in legal protections in the 19th section!”
Low point A crowded field. Seeming to believe, in 2022, that the internet was only 10 years old. Mistaking rugby league for rugby union. Moving to privatise Channel 4 despite not understanding its funding model.
(February 1, 2020) Oliver Dowden
Considered by many to be a ruthless rottweiler masquerading as likable one-nation functionary. Like several of his predecessors, Dowden had no visible qualifications for the job except a vociferous hatred of “cancel culture”.
High point The culture recovery fund during Covid, £1.57bn. Or possibly his opposition to football’s European Super League, which helped keep the unwelcome scheme at bay.
Low point Overseeing the hiring of Richard Sharp, the now-disgraced BBC chair.
(July 1, 2019) Nicky Morgan
Morgan announced her impending retirement only three months into the job, clinging on into the following year as a favour to Boris Johnson, after being hoisted into the House of Lords.
High point Drawing attention to the online bullying of female MPs – one of the stated reasons for her resignation.
Low point Defending the government funds awarded to Boris Johnson’s close friend Jennifer Arcuri during his time as mayor of London.
(July 7, 2018) Jeremy Wright
A Lego aficionado and as featureless as a minifigure, the former attorney general admitted he barely read newspapers and struggled to name a female columnist.
High point Calling for the regulation of harmful content online, telling Mark Zuckerberg that “self-regulation simply isn’t working”.
Low point Delayed the plan to reduce the maximum stake for fixed-odds betting terminals, provoking outcry and the resignation of a junior minister.
(January 7, 2018) Matt Hancock
A brief stepping stone in Hancock’s long march through the cabinet. He was relatively qualified for the sport portion of the role, having ridden Dick Doughtywylie to victory in a charity race at Newmarket in 2012.
High point Insisting Rupert Murdoch sell Sky News as part of 20th Century Fox’s attempted takeover. Fox eventually lost out to Comcast.
Low point His own app, Matt Hancock MP, which quickly tangled itself in a web of ridicule and privacy concerns. It has since been deleted.
(July 7, 2016) Karen Bradley
Tax accountant Bradley confessed to a weakness for detective novels and (surprising for a Tory) Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, placing her among the more cultured of recent culture secretaries.
High point With Rupert Murdoch seeking full control of Sky TV, Bradley referred the deal to the Competition and Markets Authority.
Low point In 2016, she blocked the appointment of Althea Efunshile, a black woman, to the all-white board of Channel 4. She was later forced to backtrack.
(May 7, 2015) John Whittingdale
If lap dancing can be counted among the arts, then the Rt Hon Sir John Flasby Lawrance Whittingdale OBE has been an keen attender, visiting For Your Eyes Only as part of a fact-finding mission.
High point Making age checks for porn websites a legal requirement.
Low point Labour called him unfit to regulate the press as several papers held unpublished stories about his prior relationship with a sex worker. (He said he did not know she worked in a brothel.)
(April 8, 2014) Sajid Javid
Like Jeremy Hunt, Trekkie Javid helped shape the reputation of the culture job as a career springboard for a Tory high flyer. Careful to put the boot into the BBC from time to time, he claimed the Today programme was “very, very anti-Tory”.
High point Worked to improve mobile phone coverage, despite the reservations of Theresa May.
Low point Claiming that Muslim communities had a special responsibility to tackle Islamism.
(September 8, 2012) Maria Miller
Miller’s time in the role was overshadowed by her personal expenses scandal. She doubled up – successfully – as women and equalities minister, introducing the same-sex marriage bill, but her interest in the arts was scant.
High point Securing Unesco world heritage status for the Forth rail bridge.Low point Her resignation, hounded out of the job by Labour and Tory MPs alike.
(May 8, 2010) Jeremy Hunt
The first Tory culture secretary after they won power from Labour in 2010, and the longest incumbent since. Wielding the austerity axe, he decimated public funding for the sector. Criticised for getting too cosy with the Murdochs.
High point Doubling the budget for the Olympics opening ceremony, allowing the Danny Boyle-directed dream-ballet that ensued.
Low point Hiding behind a tree to avoid being seen attending the same event as James Murdoch.
In his office at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he’s now master, Smith smiles at the memory. “That night, a friend made a very perceptive observation. He said: ‘Do you know the difference between health and culture? Health is a sine qua non, but culture is a raison d’être.’” He regards this as a profound truth. The job, he tells me, “is about all the things that for ordinary people make life worth living”. A person should only do it if they “really love all its component elements”.
Smith remained in the role for four years, from May 1997, until June 2001; among his greatest achievements was the money he secured for a successful rejuvenation of regional theatre (an extra £25m annually from Arts Council England). He was succeeded by Tessa Jowell, another enthusiast for the arts, who served for six years, albeit less effectively than her predecessor. But then something changed. Under Gordon Brown, there were three culture secretaries (James Purnell, Andy Burnham, Ben Bradshaw) in as many years, a situation one would attribute solely to the fact that the Labour government was in its dying days and riven by factionalism were it not for the plain reality that things didn’t improve at all under the Conservative government. In fact, they got a lot worse. In the 13 years since the Tories came to power in 2010, there have been no fewer than 12 culture secretaries. The longest serving was the first, Jeremy Hunt, in the job for two years. The shortest serving was the last but one, Michelle Donelan, who did it for just five months.
More and more, the office appears to be little more than a lily pad in the pond of political ambition. The frog MP jumps on to it, but only on his way to a bigger, better leaf. Sajid Javid (one year) moved to the business department, and from there to housing, the Home Office, the Treasury and health. Matt Hancock (six months) became health secretary. Oliver Dowden (19 months) is now the deputy prime minister. For those in the arts – as in broadcasting, the digital industries and sport – this doesn’t only mean a lack of continuity; decisions taken by an incoming minister can be actively destructive, undoing careful work in progress. When Nadine Dorries was appointed culture secretary by Boris Johnson in September 2021, Arts Council England’s (ACE’s) latest funding round was already well advanced (decisions about national portfolio organisations, which receive regular funding, are reviewed every four years). The letter she sent to ACE in February 2022 – in which she instructed that there be an annual reduction of £24m in the budget for NPO investment in London and the funds to be redirected outside the capital – was, in the words of one ACE council member, akin to “lobbing a hand grenade” at a process that was then almost settled.
But more of her later. Dorries, after all, is a symptom, as much as a cause, of the ruinous downgrading of the place of the arts in national life. In 2012, when London hosted the Olympics, there were many who believed that both the economic and social case for subsidised culture had now conclusively been made. A decade later, however, and all certainty on this has dissipated, however persuasive the figures (ACE’s annual budget is £446m; by contrast, the creative industries overall contributed £109bn to the UK economy in 2021). In the face of the cost of living crisis, a struggling NHS and a war in Ukraine, what of future culture secretaries? How best can they make the case (assuming they even want to make the case) for the arts now? Will a Labour government be any more generous than this one, which cut national funding by 30% in 2010, and has overseen a 50% reduction in arts funding by hard-pressed local authorities? How does a culture secretary fight his corner when there are so many competing claims on the chancellor’s purse?
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“One thing the last Labour government did successfully was to insist that this isn’t national heritage [the department’s old name], but something forward thinking, a massive part of our future,” says James Purnell, who was in the job for seven months for Labour, between 2007 and 2008 (he is now vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts in London). Purnell believes it’s helpful if the prime minister or chancellor is interested in culture – “Cool Britannia was part of what Tony Blair cared about, and Gordon Brown came really to care about the film industry [to which he gave tax breaks]” – but in the end, it all comes down to the numbers: “It’s such a tiny bit of money, relatively speaking, and the difference it can make is massive.” After he left the culture department, Purnell went to work and pensions. “The DWP budget was the size of the GDP of Portugal. Honestly, finding a million pounds there wouldn’t even really have [needed the involvement of] a senior official. I sort of wished I could shift the decimal points a bit… to have given a tiny bit of the DWP budget to the DCMS.” It’s thanks to this that he’s less depressed than some about what might lie ahead: “So much of the rhetoric and so many of the challenges in the next years are going to be around growth. I think that takes us back to creativity in a fundamental way. The cost of the other things is billions, but with the DCMS, it’s hundreds of millions.”
But others take a slightly different line. “The argument that the sums are small doesn’t necessarily wash with the Treasury,” says Smith. “The better one is that the arts are fundamentally important for the wellbeing, the education and the economic prospects of citizens up and down the country – and also that they’re something we do spectacularly well.” Sue Street, who was the permanent secretary at the DCMS in his time and is now the chair of the Rambert dance company, also thinks talking about the sums involved isn’t the best way forward. “I think it devalues what we do. It says: don’t worry about us; throw us peanuts, and we’ll be happy. It’s better to show every pound spent on the arts has a disproportionate effect on the public good.”
Street accepts that the culture job has long been seen as “the foothills of a ministerial career”, and that the churn of the past 13 years has been “disrespectful” to the creative industries. But neither of these things, she believes, is inevitably bad: Jeremy Hunt, the current chancellor, may be more sympathetic to lobbying by the culture department having been culture secretary himself.
And Ruth Mackenzie, a special adviser to five Labour culture secretaries and the director of the Cultural Olympiad for London 2012 (when she reported to Hunt), agrees. “Hunt is absolutely solid,” she says. “I don’t agree with his politics, but I can attest to his understanding of the arts ecology.” When she was a special adviser, she used to joke there were only two of her breed who had any special advice to give: herself, and the drug tsar. “Everybody else just wanted to be prime minister,” she says. But for a culture secretary, political skill is just as important as expertise: “It’s about alliances, because culture touches on every aspect of life – health, work, local government. It’s about conversations in corridors about political ideas as well as artistic ones.”
All of the above, however, start from a position that takes it as read that the arts are vitally important – a conviction one doesn’t sense in Morgan, who’s doubtless more representative of attitudes in the department during the last decade. During her time as culture secretary, she tells me, her main preoccupations were the online safety bill and the rollout of 5G broadband. Ask her about cuts to the arts, and she adopts a tone similar to the one some Tories use when discussing a squeeze on benefits. “It is hard if you are an organisation that relies on significant amounts of public money, and you have relied on it for a long, long time,” she says. “But things change – and what you relied on will not be the same in the future.” What does she say to those who seriously fear for the future of, say, classical music in this country? She sounds disbelieving, exasperated. “At the end of the day, people are always going to see this through their own particular experiences.”
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The downgrading of the job of culture secretary is what, in the end, led us to the savage cuts that were announced by ACE last November. Even before Dorries arrived at the department, the mood was set. After she arrived, the only way was down. After her letter to ACE, an unprecedented move, many organisations received funding for the first time, including the National Football Museum in Manchester, and the Blackpool illuminations. But many others found themselves on the receiving end of reductions in their funds – the National Theatre, English National Ballet – and some lost their subsidy completely, among them the Barbican, Donmar Warehouse and (more surprisingly, given it is not based in London, but Cambridge) the Britten Sinfonia.
Most startling of all was the plight of the English National Opera, a company established by its founder, Lilian Baylis, to bring Bizet and Verdi “to the people”. Its general funding was cut to zero, in its place a grant of £17m to help it move outside London. Where would it go? How would this affect Opera North? Would such a move be sustainable in the long term? If anyone knew the answers to these questions, they were not saying. Nor were we told how or why ACE had come to alight on ENO as its most significant victim.
In the weeks after the cuts were announced, ACE and, in particular, its chair, Nicholas Serota, formerly the director of the Tate, found themselves on the receiving end of a lot of bewilderment and anger – and it has yet to subside. “I had assumed that ACE would not just roll over and do what Nadine Dorries told them to,” says Smith, who is on the board of ENO. “I thought it would fight, explain that we mustn’t cut off our nose to spite our face.”
“Quite obviously ENO should remain in London,” says Nicholas Hytner, who runs the Bridge theatre in London and is a former director of the National Theatre. “It would appear it was punished for not doing opera in car parks, and I’m really upset about it.” The feeling grows that ignorance or dislike must have been involved; that there is something punitive here. “It’s important to have someone at the Arts Council who isn’t afraid of taking tough decisions,” says Sarah Connolly, the mezzo-soprano. “And I know he [Serota] cares deeply about galleries. But if he’d applied the same care to classical music, the same knowledge, I don’t think we’d be in this situation.”
I wanted to speak Serota, but I was told it would not be appropriate for him to talk to me. Instead, I was offered Mackenzie, who at the time of the cuts was the chair of ACE London and therefore a member of its council. Did she vote against the ENO decision? Yes. But while she’s happy to say so, she won’t tell me who voted for the cut, or why, or what kind of majority there was for the decision. Nor will she criticise Serota: “He is brilliant, agile, clever, passionate… I find the classical music world’s attacks on him unjustified and unfair. The real attack should be on Dorries, whose instruction came close to infringing the arm’s-length principle [which says that politicians do not have the ability to influence directly decisions about who gets money].”
ACE was, she insists, in an impossible position: “You can’t say no – your lawyers will tell you that – and I’m absolutely clear that Nick resigning, or all of us resigning, would have opened the way for something worse.” Couldn’t the cuts have been shared? “No. Misery for all doesn’t work, because you don’t know who’s going to go bust.” She is emphatic, brooking no argument. But the more she says, the more aware I am of the elephant in the room. Why ENO?
After this, things get strange. One of the principles of ACE’s current strategy, Let’s Create, is that art should be encouraged from the ground up. “You give communities agency,” says Mackenzie. “The last thing you do is to parachute into a community provision that it maybe doesn’t need or want.” The ENO decision, she accepts, flies in the face of this. But her alternative is baffling. More touring? At this, she bridles. “It’s not good enough to say: hello, Liverpool, you’ll get a week of opera.” Instead, she looks to Europe, in particular to France, where many regional cities sustain an opera house – a suggestion that sounds quite mad in the present financial situation.
Does she understand the fears of the classical music world at this? She does, but she also thinks – or this is what it sounds like to me – that it has itself to blame. “I don’t believe that the classical world has done enough to invest in learning programmes and workshops in the most deprived areas. It has not been as front-footed as the dance world or the theatre world. When it comes to investing in diverse talent, it has fallen behind.” Mackenzie believes that changing minds in government is often best done in private, and that “the classical music world has good address books”. And if charm doesn’t work, ENO will survive because “arts people are brilliant at making something out of nothing”. But she remains hopeful that there is a possibility the decision will go the same way as the privatisation of Channel 4: that it will be quietly reversed, post-Dorries. She is, I would say, sanguine all round – as well as in the grip of something more ideological.
But the arts world doesn’t share her optimism. Far from it. “The mood is completely despairing,” says Connolly, who has written to Serota at length (as yet, she has arrived no reply). “People are terrified and intimidated. Already artists cannot work in Europe for more than 90 days at a time [post-Brexit], and now they’re wondering where highly trained new musicians and singers will go because [with these cuts], they have taken away more opportunities here.” Combine this with the drastic cuts to music education in schools, and the future looks to her to be unspeakably bleak.
Hytner agrees. Ever since he wrote a newspaper article about the cuts last May, his inbox has been flooded. “At the moment, individual artists as well as companies big and small feel totally beleaguered,” he says. “This is what is so outrageous to me. The people who are always left out of this decision are the artists.” I’ve never heard him sound so angry – but then, now that he no longer works in the subsidised sector himself, perhaps he feels more able to speak out. (Though even the non-subsidised sector is struggling: the Bridge has a £6m pandemic loan to pay off, and is planning to leave its smash hit Guys and Dolls on for as long as possible; Hytner points out that when Rishi Sunak came to see Guys and Dolls there was considerably less interest than when a politician goes to the football.)
Certainly, Hytner speaks very directly to the arguments of both the politicians and Serota’s stand-in, Mackenzie. The plain fact is, he says, that for too long, massive social injustices have been displaced on to the arts. “The arts have become a proxy. It’s a kind of sleight of hand. We’re now the scapegoat for the failure of an entire economic and social agenda. The arts have been expected to address an educational divide in neglected communities, and as a result we now have less money with which we are expected to do much, much more. Many years ago, we embraced those educational and community agendas very happily; at the National Theatre, I let those who knew about such things get on with it, and they were brilliant. But we should have insisted that as those activities grew – as we were told to grow them – the money would come from the relevant government departments [health, education], and not from the culture budget.”
Recently, he met a young director with his own company. “What this person was saying to me was that while he had a chance of money from the Arts Council, as part of his application, he had to put on these very specific workshops. But in order to do that, he had to pay rent to a community space, which would effectively wipe out any money he would get from ACE. Now, maybe that’s what ACE wants. But I can tell you, he was rolling his eyes.” One thing his anguished inbox has revealed to him is that “organisations are now expected to do things they’re not even very good at doing”. Where, Hytner wonders, does excellence fit into this? Good work? Between them, successive culture secretaries and ACE have created an “absurd, fictional conflict” between the aspirational, the ambitious, the challenging, and communities. The clock is now ticking, and ever more loudly. There will be casualties, he says, and no one he knows believes otherwise.
