From Jeremy Hunt to Lucy Frazer via Matt Hancock, Nadine Dorries and the rest, recent incumbents have overseen a massive reduction in funding, and steadily downgraded the place of the arts in national life
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.)
