SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Run by a Lego fan, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport no longer stacks up

his column, being about culture, tries to avoid politics; but as politics does all it can to intrude into our culture, this is not always possible. Two recent stories have led me to question what the point is, or should be, of what we now call the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. First, Jeremy Wright, the Secretary of State at the department, was asked to name his cultural interests. He said without humour or irony that he collected Lego bricks. The other was my colleague Rupert Christiansen’s excellent end-ofyear opera review in this newspaper, where he noted the continued, indifferent reputation of English National Opera.

No one expects the Health Secretary to be a surgeon, or the Education Secretary to be a teacher; and even the Lord Chancellor no longer has to be a lawyer (though some who have not been have proven catastrophic). But given that culture is for most a leisure activity, it might be helpful if the DCMS Secretary had devoted a little of his spare time to reading the odd book, listening to the occasional piece of music, visiting a gallery or two or cultivating an informed interest in architecture or the cinema, as most civilised people do. That he appears to have gone through life untouched by high art makes him a pitiful choice for his present post: and suggests this dismal Government cares no more about the arts than it does about anything else.

If the department is to exist – and I am coming to the conclusion it should not – it needs to have some positive effect on our cultural life. To return to Christiansen’s point about ENO: some ministers have been aware of ENO’s under-performance for years, their concern justified by the input of taxpayers’ money into the enterprise. I had a conversation some years ago with a DCMS minister and suggested a new approach to

ENO, and even offered the names of excellent young professionals in British opera who might effect a transformation. Inevitably, nothing happened. So I still wonder what the point is of DCMS if, even when a serious problem stares it in the face, its main response is one of inertia.

There have been big cuts to public finding of the arts since the financial crash of 2008; and it is right that there should have been. It is more important to educate children and treat the sick than to subsidise opera tickets. However, some state funding is necessary for museums, libraries and even music teaching if we are not to become a land without culture, and providing such things is part of our duty to educate.

So long as public money supports the arts, someone in government must be accountable to parliament for how it is apportioned. But does this require a department of state to do it? Its digital responsibilities could be hived off to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Its broadcasting oversight could return to the Home Office. It oversees press regulation: yet in a free country the Government need have nothing to do with regulating the press, which should regulate itself. Sport is now largely a business and should come under the Department for Business. And if we must have a national lottery, the Treasury should run it: it has always been a tax on stupidity, and its revenues are spent on causes that would otherwise siphon off taxpayers’ money. A wellchosen, culturally literate minister of state in the Privy Council office could superintend national heritage. And such a minister could, with the assistance of intelligent officials, oversee an Arts Fund that disburses public money to deserving causes.

The present department also has responsibility for government policy in the creative industries, which is a joke. What can we expect the Legomane Secretary of State to bring to such questions as the training of artists in England, or the development of our cinema, or which architecture merits preservation, or how to rescue ENO from its apparently permanent decline?

If the Prime Minister can’t be bothered to put in this department someone with the motivation and ability to give an intelligent lead on its responsibilities, then it suggests the department is pointless. I have never been sure that culture in this country needs the state, not least because when states have in living memory interfered in culture – one thinks of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – the results were pretty revolting. It is time we questioned our status quo.