Many will feel great sympathy for Darren Henley, currently celebrating 10 years as CEO of Arts Council England.
By 2015, austerity had firmly taken hold and the arts were never going to be viewed favourably. It didn’t help that an unsympathetic government seemed determined to appoint a series of uninterested politicians to lead on Culture, the epitome being Nadine Dorries, who gave the impression of regarding the arts as an enemy to be taken down or demolished.
If that context was bad enough, the advent of a global COVID-19 pandemic could have been the kiss of death and, sadly, proved to be for hundreds of thousands of UK citizens and a handful of arts institutions. While some of the allocations might have been open to question, there’s no question that Arts Council England provided emergency grants and loans which saved some bodies from disappearing forever.
Once these factors combined, Henley was regularly left attempting to defend the indefensible as ever-shrinking budgets caused problems, exacerbated by instructions from Ms Dorries to take funding away from long-established institutions and spread it to the less well-known, and some might argue less deserving.
Periodically, Henley has done his best to make a case for devastating cuts, but those in and around the arts community have rarely been convinced. Defunding numerous theatres and cutting subsidies to the great and the good, including the National Theatre and the RSC, was always going to be a hard sell, and, to be fair, Henley was loyal, never pointing the finger at ministers of state or the government more widely, who were the real perpetrators of the crimes. Whether he ever attempted to resist is not on the record.
Some of the decisions do appear to have been taken by ACE, perhaps the most high-profile and egregious the blackmailing of the English National Opera, which had its funding taken away but dangled if it was willing to relocate from its London home to the north of England.
Initially, even those in Manchester where it is to re-settle gave the impression of being far from enthusiastic, while Londoners and, one imagines, tourists will feel the loss for generations. Performers and administrators who lose their jobs will hardly give this move the thumbs up, although it will presumably create work for some in the North West, but probably considerably fewer. Financially, this is also going to be a hard sell, since revenues will inevitably fall on the basis that ticket prices cannot remain at existing levels and venue capacities are likely to be lower.
This week, Mr Henley has taken a leaf out of the Republican playbook, mirroring the antics of Pete Hegseth, currently the US Secretary of Defense, but for how much longer? Anyone who has avoided news stories for the last couple of weeks may not realise that the supremo of the US military establishment has a penchant for sharing classified information with journalists, but also friends and family. His answers to such accusations, mirroring the strategy of the President, is not to deny the undeniable but instead attack those who spread vicious truths.
Coincidentally, that appears to be the strategy employed by Mr Henley, who claims in The Guardian that Arts Council England “has suffered because of 'London-centric' media coverage.” He fleshed out his complaint in direct language: “I observe the London-centricity in our media. I go around the country, and the people who lead in those places don’t get the half-page columns in our national newspapers as easily as the people who are London based.
“There’s a power dynamic there… there’s a sort of imbalance. Maybe the role I have to play when I’m sitting in the corridors of power in London is to be representative of all those places who don’t have a seat at that table.”
This is a response to criticism following the removal of public subsidies from classical music centre the Wigmore Hall. It may also be a response to the announcement by the current culture secretary Lisa Nandy that there is to be a much-needed review of ACE.
We can all accept that a great deal of the criticism of the body has come as a result of funding cuts to London arts organisations. However, many will view these attacks as fully justified, since Arts Council England sometimes seems intent on diminishing the arts and many of the key players are based in the capital.
However, it is unfair to say that journalists exclusively pick on the funding body when it hits London theatres concert halls and the like. British Theatre Guide was hardly the only news outlet to issue howls of protest when ACE effectively decided to close down the Oldham Coliseum, over 200 miles from the capital but on the periphery of Manchester.
In reality, the media are not responsible for cuts to arts funding or the allocation of what remains. In the first case, successive governments must shoulder the blame, and when it comes to allocating the funds, newspapers and web sites have zero influence—this is the responsibility of Arts Council England.