Does anybody want to be the poet laureate?

Pay: terrible. Insults: vicious. Tristram Fane Saunders reports on Britain’s most bizarre job hunt

Who would want to be poet laureate? John Skelton, Henry VIII’s tutor and selfproclaimed “Lauryate”, had to put up with rivals “rudely revilyng me in the kynges noble hall”, and royal poets have faced mud-slinging ever since – especially from other poets.

Dryden, the first modern laureate, called his successor, Shadwell, “a foul mass of corrupted matter”. George III’s poet Pye was guilty of churning out verse “doggedly and dully” according to Southey, who found he suffered from the same problem on inheriting the post.

When the one-time antimonarchist Wordsworth took the royal appointment in 1843, Robert Browning called him a turncoat. “Just for a handful of silver he left us,” he wrote in The Lost Leader, urging poets everywhere to “blot out his name”. In 1999, the appointment of Andrew Motion was denounced as “a shameful failure of integrity and imagination” by Carol Ann Duffy. She had nothing against Motion, but felt the job should have gone to a woman. (Of course, a decade later, for the first time in history, it did.)

As Duffy’s 10-year tenure comes to an end this year, it’s time for the country to choose its new bardic mascot. But who makes that choice? Until now it has been shrouded in obfuscation, but this time the Government has laid the whole process bare. A “steering group” of 15 named experts has been assembled from the heads of various literary festivals, libraries and poetry organisations around the UK. The group has drawn up a shortlist of four or five poets, culled from a longer list after a bit of back-and-forth with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

It is now up to the DCMS to make the final selection – or selections, if the first choice turns the post down, as Philip Larkin did in 1984. As a formality, the decision is passed on to the Prime Minister, who then submits it to the Queen for approval. In practice, however, the buck stops with the head of the DCMS, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright.

This is a problem. There are front-bench politicians with an expressed interest in contemporary poetry: Tom Watson tweets about slim volumes from small presses; Michael Gove once stood up in Parliament to wish Geoffrey Hill a happy birthday. By contrast, as Simon Heffer has pointed out in these pages, Jeremy Wright’s only cultural interest seems to be his Lego collection.

This means the final appointment is essentially a game of pin the tail on the donkey, so it’s vital that the donkeys on the shortlist are all worthy of the tail. I don’t envy the steering group’s job. After all, how can you choose a laureate, when it’s still not altogether clear what a laureate is?

Each of the 20 previous incumbents has taken a different approach to the role. Ted Hughes – the last to hold the laureateship for life – believed it was about a sacred link with the monarchy and became very close with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. (By contrast, Duffy does not spend her evenings chin-wagging with the royals; a source tells me it would be “inappropriate”.) Hughes made his views on the matter clear when collared by a Telegraph reporter

“in the bar of a public house” on the day of his appointment in 1984. “The Crown is the symbol of spiritual unity of the tribe. When that’s outmoded, so will be the poet laureate,” he said, before adding: “I have drunk far too much champagne.”

In theory, being laureate entails no more work than being an OBE. The title is defined online by the royal household as “an honour awarded by HM to a poet whose work is of national significance”. Wordsworth only took the role after being assured by the Prime Minister that “you shall have nothing required of you”. The public may expect topical poems on state occasions, but the Queen doesn’t. Quit writing and move to Majorca, and you’ll still be eligible for your annual salary.

That salary, as it happens, is £6,000, paid for by DCMS, and a “butt of sack” (cask of sherry) gifted by a vineyard in Spain. The booze was originally a gift received