The V&A in London’s South Kensington is Britain’s go-to museum for fashionistas and the one with the most social cachet thanks to grand opening parties. Exhibitions this year have featured Coco Chanel, Elton John, Naomi Campbell, and, this month, a Taylor Swift songbook trail with 16 stage looks on display. Yet the selection for the coveted post of a new chair has been mired in a lengthy and politically charged process for more than a year after Nicholas Coleridge’s departure to chair Historic Royal Palaces and become provost-elect of Eton College.
Like all posts for trustees, board members or chairs in the arts, media and sport, the starting point is a panel run by the Department of Culture. But under the last Conservative government, the process was widened to include special advisers and the Cabinet Office, before, finally, Downing Street. Critics said this led to more Tory donors and allies getting top jobs. These included Richard Sharp at the BBC, Michael Grade at Ofcom, John Booth at the National Gallery, and David Ross at the National Portrait Gallery.
Last summer Samir Shah, a former V&A trustee, began applying for the chairmanship of the museum, which has outposts in Dundee and in east London where its revamped Young V&A was last week named the Museum of the Year. But Shah, whose professional career has been in TV, dropped out when the BBC chair became vacant after Sharp’s departure over his failure to reveal his role in helping then prime minister Boris Johnson receive an £800,000 loan.
Some in the Tory party thought their former chair Ben Elliot would make a good V&A chairman. He has been a museum trustee for several years, and was regarded as the Tories’ best fundraiser under Johnson. “But I never applied and did not want to,” says Elliot. Yet rumours still spread that Downing Street sought Elliot for the V&A. “People have not been telling the truth,” he says.
By early spring, Rory Stewart, the historian, writer and former Tory minister, now best known for his The Rest Is Politics podcast with Alastair Campbell, expressed an interest in applying.
The DCMS panel eventually came up with two names, whom they considered “appointable”: Sarah Sands, a former newspaper and BBC Today programme editor, and Nigel Newton, founder of publisher Bloomsbury, who signed JK Rowling. He is also president of the Publishers Association. Last year Sands, who now works for the communications company Hawthorn, coincidentally co-founded by Elliot, also sought to chair the British Council, but lost out.
The two names were put to the cabinet office and Downing Street, but when the election was called in late May, the process was halted. The new culture secretary Lisa Nandy may want to start the process again. But whatever she decides, many in the cultural sector would like to see changes to an appointments process that has come to be seen as overly political.
Delays have led to more than 100 unfilled posts. “The whole thing has ground to a halt because of its complexity,” says Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A. He suggests the culture department panel is, effectively, the arbiter. “Only the final selection should be the minister.”
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Sir John Tusa, former head of BBC World Service and the Barbican Centre, goes further. “Why is there any political role in deciding a trustee or chair?” Tusa, who has served on boards of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and English National Opera, was in 2007 himself appointed to chair the V&A, but resigned before taking up the post over a conflict with chairing the University of the Arts, London. “Great national arts institutions should not be party political playthings for giving favours to cronies,” says Tusa.