ONE day I shall make a bit of money for myself — and life easier for countless hacks as yet unborn — by publishing a book called
Breaking News That Writes Itself. It will set out templates for stories that recur so often that hard-pressed journalists will need merely to insert the appropriate new names, while retaining all the time-honoured syntax and clichés.
Pride of place will be given to one I call “Shock Resignation in the Cultural World, Not”. It will go like this:
The world of British pottery/knitting/morris-dancing was rocked last night by the shock resignation of X after just two years/two months/two days at the helm of the beleaguered (name of institution). When X was appointed after a brilliant career running the whelks/futons/ball-bearings marketing board in Tasmania/Canada/Singapore, s/he was expected to make sweeping reforms to deal with a deficit now running at £10 million/billion.
However, X soon fell victim to a whispering campaign, accusing him/her of improper use of paperclips and of wearing flashy Armani/Lagerfeld jackets in the office. Rebellion broke out when X ordered that the staff canteen serve chocolate digestives/custard creams instead of custard creams/chocolate digestives, thus ending a tradition dating back to the First World War/Great Fire of London. An insider commented: “We are not against change, but X had no feeling for the special atmosphere that makes our institution a byword for traditional values/Old Etonians/custard creams.”
And so on. If I had a tenner for every time that story has appeared in the past 25 years, I could tender my own Shock Resignation and emigrate to a yacht in the Med. And last week it even cropped up twice on the same day. Dame Judith Mayhew, the feisty New Zealander who has been Provost of the venerable but broke King’s College, Cambridge, for the past two years, announced that she was taking a year’s paid sabbatical . . . and then quitting the college anyway (gosh, I hope I can wangle a resignation like that). Meanwhile, Lindsay Sharp, the equally feisty Aussie director of the equally venerable and broke Science Museum, also resigned suddenly.
Both tales followed the quintessential archetype. Mayhew was a Corporation of London high-flyer before becoming the first non-King’s graduate to run King’s in 500 years. She was expected to utilise her business acumen to quick-fix a £1.2 million deficit. But when she publicly savaged the college’s administration, the college’s bursar left in such acrimonious circumstances that it took lawyers a year to resolve the dispute.
By then, though, Mayhew had committed an even worse faux pas. In an effort, apparently, to attract more swanky conferences to King’s, she ordered that the famously red-walled college bar — its decor symbolic of King’s cherished left-wing ethos — should be repainted beige. A hammer-and-sickle motif was also humourlessly blotted out. Talk about beige rag to a bull! Mayhew was doomed from that moment.
Meanwhile, Sharp’s attempts to pep up the Science Museum’s image resulted in what was virtually a replay of Roy Strong’s turbulent era at the V&A. Sharp became the victim of some truly vile character assassination in a much-circulated anonymous e-mail. I am only surprised that he put up with it for as long as he did.
I have met both Sharp and Mayhew. I like them. They are wilful but engaging, and certainly not wrong in their respective diagnoses of what needed overhauling in their organisations. But both were accidents waiting to happen. There is a certain sort of British institution which is so entrenched in its primordial customs that all attempts at reform trigger outrage. Such places are typically staffed by bright but narrowly-focused people, who fight their own corners ferociously and are so poorly paid that they are perpetually disaffected. Oxbridge colleges, national museums, subsidised theatres, the Church of England: these are classic examples.
To send in a tough outsider to shake up such bastions in a whirlwind of change sounds exciting. But it rarely works. As in warfare, so in office politics: an invading intruder doesn’t know the lay of the land, so is horribly vulnerable to guerrilla ambush.
So how do you modernise a British cultural institution? Hmm, tricky. But when you look at ones that have been successfully revitalised you usually find that the change has been wrought by low-key stealth. Think of how Tony “clipboard” Hall quelled the turmoil at the Royal Opera. Or how “Whispering” Nick Serota unobtrusively exerts a magisterial grip on the Tate. Or how Clive Gillinson spent 20 years turning the London Symphony Orchestra from a greedy rabble into a world-class ensemble.
That may be the way to do it. On the other hand, life would be infinitely duller without the axe-wielding outsiders who think they can turn round an institution in six months of bawling, brawling and bruising.
So who would I like to see as the next Provost of King’s? Well, how about Sir Alan Sugar? His rugged bon mots — “I don’t like bullshi’ers, I don’t like schmoozers and I don’t like arselickers” — would spice up the High Table conversation no end.
Absolute beginners
AS a result of the bombs on the Tube and the buses, cycling has soared in the esteem of Londoners. Once generally regarded as a near-suicidal way to cross the city, it now seems like the safest. So the roads are full of commuters wobbling on two wheels for the first time since they were teenagers.
I won’t say that these Lycra virgins are resented by those of us who have pedalled to work for years. I just wish they wouldn’t stop without warning every time a traffic light turns red. Hasn’t anyone told them? It doesn’t apply to us.
Awe sum
AFTER bulldozing the scheme through heaven knows how many years of planning inquiries and protests, the Government has dumped its plan to bury the main road past Stonehenge in a tunnel. It claims that the cost has doubled to £470 million. Now, presumably, there will be more years of feckless official dithering while an alternative bypass route is debated. Meanwhile, millions of tourists will come away from the tacky, cluttered, noisy, meaningless mess that is the present Stonehenge “experience” feeling appalled and ripped off.
What are ministers playing at? Stonehenge should be our Pyramids, our Ayers Rock and our Pantheon: a magical place in which to commune with ancestral spirits in tranquillity. So what if it costs £470 million to clear away the crud surrounding the stones? No Russian billionaire would think twice before splashing out that much on a football team likely to stay together for five years at the most. Surely one of the world’s richest nations can afford to restore dignity to a monument which has been inspiring awe for 5,000 years.
A Wolves fan shunned
HOW ironic that the crass local councillors who tried to stop Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory from being sung on Remembrance Day (because of its alleged “political connotations”) come from Wolverhampton. Don’t they know of the link between the composer and the city? Elgar was a lifelong fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the nearest decent football club to his Worcester home. Indeed in 1893 ( as was revealed on these pages a few years ago) he wrote what was probably the world’s first football chant to honour his beloved Wolves.
I don’t wish to belittle Wolverhampton’s links with the other great creative geniuses of Western civilisation. But unless its councillors know of some visit to the West Midlands made by Mozart or Beethoven, I suggest that they stick with Land of Hope and Glory. After all, that’s what the soldiers being commemorated died for.
