AI Profile, Ed Vaizey, Shadow Minister of Culture
The man who would be Minister of State for Culture next summer if things go according to his party’s plan makes no secret of his belief that although it will be the best job in government that will be only be true until he gets his boss’s job. Ed Vaizey wants to be Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He’s told Jeremy Hunt, the man currently in the slot, so that there can be no mistake.
For a man who, at 41, has been an MP for all of four years he has vaulting ambition, but his provenance suggests that he can justify his self-belief. His father was John Vaizey, the economist and educationalist who was made a life peer by Harold Wilson only to cross the floor and join Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives a couple of years later. He died in 1984. His mother is the art critic Marina Vaizey.
He is a law graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where he met and became close friends with the shadow education secretary Michael Gove, and went on to get a law diploma from City University. A year later he was called to the Bar and practiced for three years specialising in family law before briefly running the Public Policy Unit PR company, then, having stood as a Conservative candidate in Bristol East at the 1997 general election, joined the public affairs agency Politics International, and then a mobile phone and internet company, Consolidated Communications. He spent the 2001 election he put his own parliamentary ambitions on hold for a session to act as Ian Duncan Smith’s gofer.
Meanwhile he had been advising Ken Clarke and Michael Howard, the Leader of the Opposition, on employment and education issues and in 2004 he became Howard’s chief speech writer. In less than a year was elected for Wantage, and a few months after that he married his wife, Alex. They have two children, Joseph and Martha.
The Hon Edward Henry Butler Vaizey is close to the Tory high command as a member of Cameron’s Notting Hill set, and edited the Blue Books of 2001 to 2003 that set the tone for early Cameron policy, beginning with A Blue Tomorrow in which he worked with Gove and Nick Boles.
As well as being politically hyperactive Ed Vaizey is frequently in the public eye either as a regular contributor to The Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers or on radio and television, as likely to appear on Radio Five Live as Newsnight. He gets impatient when asked the standard arts reporter’s question, “what did you last see”, responding dismissively, “Oh, can’t remember”. In fact, he turns up to most things, concerts, exhibitions, theatre, though he admits to not being particularly keen on opera and dance.
Having done the apprenticeship, he expects to be doing the job as culture minister within then next few months, and the good news appears to be that nothing will change, immediately at any rate. He hints that that there might be more radical remoulding of the arts subsidy system later on, within the arm’s length model
In 2007 he commissioned Sir John Tusa to chair a working party looking at potential arts policy, and while the resulting report stopped short of calling for the abolition of the Arts Council it recommended that the government should take on the direct funding of the five flagship companies. Although Vaizey had earlier said ACE’s future was not guaranteed, he and Hunt neither adopted the abolition stance nor the direct funding proposal. When the think tank New Culture Forum produced a paper in June calling for Ace’s national office to be abolished “because a managerial culture has poisoned the Arts Council”, he demurred decisively: “I want to put on the record that the Tories are not going to abolish the Arts Council” he said.
He has spent several weeks working with the Arts Council and admits to having been impressed by Alan Davey and his team. He told The Guardian earlier this year. “One of the goals I have set myself is, if the Tories win on a Thursday, there will be far fewer people in the arts world waking up in a cold sweat on a Friday”. One thing he is determined to do is to enhance the teaching of music in schools, which he believes to have been badly neglected.
Nor does he work in a vacuum in the shadow government. When Hunt predecessor, Hugo Swire, suggested that the Tories might abolish re admission to national museums and galleries, introduced by the Labour culture secretary Chris Smith in 2001, he was fired. Vaizey is keen to confirm that free admission is safe, and when Ben Bradshaw accused the London mayor of mooting the reintroduction of admission charges, he was howled down.
But that doesn’t mean to say there won’t be pain to come. Although he sees arts budget cuts as sensible policy as it might have been in previous Conservative governments, he believes the frontline arts organisations have proved their worth and cuts would cause pointless damage. He believes substantial savings can be found within the cultural bureaucracies which may mean some ACE programmes being chopped. Indeed, if the economical situation allows he wants the Arts Council to identify certain “cornerstone” arts organisations who must be subsidised, and give them longer term funding deals.
And although he is thought to be an admirer of Roy Clare, the CEO of the Museums Archives and Libraries Council, there are likely to be changes there, such as the separating off of libraries, and probably of archives too.
That would lie in what he terms “good management”, but there may in fact be more money for the arts under a Conservative government. The declared policy is to return to the four “good causes” to benefit form the National Lottery, as originally declared in the 1993 Act. Labour have at best blurred the divisions, at worst done a “smash and grab” in favour of the Olympics and other projects, and that would stop. Arts and heritage could stand to get another £50m each a year on top of the £180m they have been allocated for this year.
He is a champion of “cultural entrepreneurship”, and of the mix of subsidy and private funding when he believes allows it to thrive, as he write in The Guardian in August: “… there are clearly opportunities to identify smart savings to ensure the continued vitality of our cultural and creative sectors” he wrote. “This process is not just about efficiencies but about identifying and nurturing opportunities for creativity and innovation off-stage and beyond exhibition. Where there is entrepreneurial activity and flair, and a structure supportive of innovation, the most interesting work – cultural and commercial – occurs”, and he went on to praise the initiative of our associates CulureLabel, “applying the best commercial minds to the business of culture”.
Vaizey is a strong believer in the value of private arts support, and is likely to support tax breaks for living donations of works of art. “I believe in a mixed cultural economy in which private and public funding work together” he says. “It’s very important not to get fixated on conflict with the Arts Council, but we’re starting the question: What’s the best way forward?”
CURRICULUM VITAE
1968 Born, June 5
1979-86 St Paul’s School
1986-89 Merton College, Oxford
1989-91 Desk officer, Conservative Research Department
1993-96 Practices at the Bar
1996-7 Dirrector, Public Policy Unit
1997 Parliamentary candidate in Bristol East
1997-98 Politics International
1998-2003 Consolidated Communications
2004 Chief speech writer to Leader of the Opposition
2005 Elected MP for Wantage
2005 Marries Alexandra Holland, two children
2006. Appointed shadow arts spokesman
