With respect, Nicky, the arts don’t need you
Nicky Morgan may be back at the DCMS, but, in truth, it’s time this department was scrapped, says Rupert Christiansen
Of all Boris Johnson’s actions since his triumph last week, the most unreadable is his decision to elevate Nicky Morgan to a peerage and keep her on as Secretary of State to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with a place in Cabinet.
A “One Nation” Tory to the left of the party, Morgan had stood down as an MP before the election, claiming that she had had enough of the abuse flung at politicians. A tweet she posted yesterday suggested that she anticipates remaining in the post only for the “vital first weeks” of the new government – in other words, until the major reshuffle rumoured to be taking place in February.
But her treatment is being interpreted in hostile quarters as cronyism, garnering accusations that
Johnson is rewarding someone who remained loyal to him throughout the campaign, at least to the extent of keeping her mouth shut as to her more ideological reasons for quitting.
The more likely explanation is that Johnson simply hasn’t made up his mind what to do with the DCMS. Only appointed minister there five months ago, Morgan was the ninth person to hold this job in the last decade – a record that suggests some inherent fault lines within its structure. Several latterly prominent figures – Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid and Matt Hancock among them – have passed through its portals, but it’s not somewhere that anyone seems to make their mark and its miscellaneous portfolio is continually being expanded or contracted.
Underneath the Secretary of State sits a junior minister for the arts. Between 2010 and 2016 this position was tenaciously held by Ed Vaizey, who had genuine personal interest in the brief (he remains a trustee for the exemplary
London
Music Masters scheme) and valiantly tried to stand up for it without any power to do so effectively. Who has served as arts minister since then, I have no idea; neither do I have any idea what he or she does all day beyond cutting ribbons, patting backs, attending charity matinees and signing off on documents controlling the export of works of national heritage that have come up for auction. Other minor responsibilities – computer games, the stationery cupboard, dog walking – have also sometimes been additionally palmed off on this poor mutt; it’s a dead-end job that nobody wants, ripe for the satire of WS Gilbert. I suppose we need the DCMS in some form. Certainly the issues surrounding the control of communications are crucially complex at a time when the Chinese are hovering, and the renewal of the BBC licence fee is potentially explosive. But if there is one useful thing that Nicky Morgan can effect over her probably short term of office, it might be that of persuading Johnson to drop the Government’s fig-leaf of official representation of the arts. What matters is that properly constituted arts organisations should continue to be allowed favourable tax status as charitable trusts, and that everything is done to encourage individuals, business and local authorities to donate. The Treasury should also continue to pass an annual grant-in-aid to Arts Council England, but that body should be reconstituted so that specific funding awards are made by panels of peergroup practitioners, not a secretariat.
Stripped of much of its expertise as
According to the Treasury, subsidies must only go to projects that contribute to inclusivity or diversity
well as its running costs, Arts Council England has been left a weak, demoralised and impoverished body, largely staffed by form-fillers without the passionate commitment and deep experience to make strong imaginative judgments. That it has survived at all is largely due to the diplomatic cunning of its chairman, Nicholas Serota, who knows how to play the game and keep the level of funding from falling though the floor.
But its sphere of action remains hobbled by directives from the DCMS, itself enslaved to a Treasury mandate decreeing that the arts should only be subsidised inasmuch as they serve areas of social priority such as inclusivity and diversity, the disfranchised young, the disabled old, and the prison population. While I acknowledge the logic and justice in this, I think the pendulum has swung too far in its direction. The arts improve the fabric of our lives immeasurably, but the arts can only do their work and thrive if they are free to make their own decisions about what is valuable. Keep Whitehall out of it.