The former chancellor’s new role is just one example of the merry-go-round of appointments at the top of arts institutions
George Osborne’s appointment as chair of the British Museum trustees has caused an understandable outcry. That the chancellor responsible for a 30% cut over the past decade to its funding should become its leader is a wild irony. And of course it wasn’t just the British Museum that suffered because of him. Osborne’s cuts, when chancellor, hurt theatres, festivals, museums, libraries – because apparently scraped-together thousands from dance companies would, laughably, help salvage public finances in the wake of the banking crisis.
The appointment has been seen, too, in the context of a government consistently in breach of the arm’s-length principle that supposedly protects the arts from direct political interference. The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, has weighed in on everything to what gets sung at the Last Night of the Proms to the fate of statues, issuing thinly veiled threats to English arts organisations that future funding will depend on adherence to his policy on contested heritage. If you look at the government’s desire to insert former Mail editor Paul Dacre as chair of Ofcom, the appointment of Tory donor Richard Sharp to the chairmanship of the BBC, and the scandalous vetoing of academic Aminul Hoque’s second term on the board of the National Maritime Museum, then it all adds up to a determined drive to stop the lefties having their way with culture.
