The old row between metro-centric national press and regional arts rears its over the New Art Gallery, Walsall. As we all know, it was a bold and risky project for a local authority in this kind of community to go for, but theydid, ACE bac ked them, Peter Jenkinson got it made and opened, Jenkinson left for neew adventures, and rocky times followed. Then, five years ago, Stephen Snoddy came in and turned the place around. Out went the top floor restaurant nobody used, in came a Costa café on the ground floor, along with evening events, in exhibitions, partnerships with other galleries, artists’ studios. But the last five years seemed to pass by at least one national journalist. Last week NAG celebrated its 10th birthday with 1100 guests at a party and a celebratory exhibition with work by Renoir to Gilbrt & George. But that morning Rosie Millard had chosen the anniversary to have a piece in the Indy about failed lottery funded arts projects. Out came the Pop Museum in Sheffield and the Doncaster Earth Centre, both undoubted mistakes. But she included NAG in her catalogue of failure: ‘…where were the temporary shows, the must-see exhibitions, the retrospectives, the touring presentations of interesting work? Last year, it had such difficulty attracting a crowd that it only managed to reverse its unstoppable downward visitor spiral by introducing a raft of free events… it is not a seriously rated contemporary arts venue. “Frankly, the collection was much better when it was hung in the local library,” a contemporary-art curator murmured to me’. Not nice, but what puzzled Snoddy that the erstwhile BBC arts correspondent had never been near the place, in his time at least, ‘and got it so badly wrong’. The truth is that since 2006 visitor numbers have gone up by leaps and bounds and last year broke 200,000 for the first time. Emails, texts, letters and phone calls have been fired off from Walsall, needless to say, expressing ‘disappointment’ at the ‘lazy journalism’, but it goes deeper than that. The coming three or four years are going to be extremely tough for regional galleries like this one when subsidy is going to be cut, even when they are on the up as NAG is, and they are going to rely even more heavily on visitors spend, sponsorship. ‘A story in a national paper saying we are failing, however untrue, could have very serious consequences for us’ Snoddy tells me. So he’s invited Rosie up for a personal tour, but she should beware if the conversation turns testy: Snoddy is a Level 6 rugby referee.

Here’s a shocker which could lead to calls for the heads of Roy Clare and Sir Andrew Motion as heads of the MLA. The council’s Renaissance budget which feeds our troubled regional museums is underspent by almost £5m for 2009-10, and the money has already gone back to the DCMS. The Museums Journal quotes Clare as saying ‘It’s not an under-spend, it’s a right-spend. There would be no point in shovelling money out of the door just to spend it before the year-end’, but we can each of us think of a dozen museums at least that would have benefited for a smidgen of that pot – which is 10% of the budget. Apparently the underspend is due to the MLA’s new way of allocating money to the regional hubs – a simple system of not giving it to them?

The longlist for the £100,000 Art Fund Museum Prize is out and among the eclectic selection of 11 is a surprise omission. The Ashmolean is there, Hampton Court Palace, the Great North Museum in Newcastle, the National Army Museum, as well as the more exquisite candidates such as the Leach Pottery in St Ives and the Towner in Eastbourne. But why isn’t the V&A’s £32m medieval and renaissance galleries which opened in November? Simple. They didn’t apply.

OK, now it’s serious. There will be a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ and Tony Hall will make sure of it. They’ve made him a member of the House of Lords today to give him the platform to bully it through. It comes in the week that his nominee as director of it, Ruth Mackenzie, starts work.

And all this after almost five years of faffing around after it was our cultural acuity that was credited with winning (if that’s the word) the 2012 Olympics in the first place.

But it won’t be called the Cultural Olympiad. Mackenzie’s first job is to come up with a name that everyone can reasonably be expected to understand, one word that bears no relation to that other bureaucratic confection which doesn’t mean anything. The next thing is to make it so that it doesn’t get trapped in the IOC’s spider’s web around logos, accreditation and badges.

Then she has to invent a festival, because that is what it will amount to – a ‘festival of festivals’, probably a vast street event that has to do the impossible thing of having a national impact and also giving the impoverished five East End boroughs that surround the Olympic site some kind of, dread word as Beachcomber would say, legacy. This why she has got Brian McMaster (ex-Edinburgh Festival), Alex Poots (Manchester Festival) and Martin Duncan (Chichester Festival Theatre) as paid advisers. The fourth is English National Ballet’s Craig Hassall, who was in c charge of branding for the Sydney Olympics.

Lord H started with no budget when his board was created last July but he’s managed to shake down £80m in cash and kind for Mackenzie to work with, and has told her to come up with one announcement, and one only, in a couple of months, which means April.

‘We’ve got a chance to make culture a part of what the Olympics does’ he told we hacks at lunch last week. ‘We’ve got a chance to change the way this country looks at arts and culture by making a statement that this is as important as sport’. Now he can bang on about it in a forum where everyone will take notice. Won’t they?

Like you I’m sure, I had hoped the Ben and Boris Show, or Wadleygate as it has inevitably become known, would be fading away, at least until an ACE London chair is appointed. Fat chance. I’m talking about Boris Johnson’s attempt to get his cheerleader, erstwhile Standard editrix Veronica Wadley, into the job, culture secretary Ben Bradshaw’s resistance and the collateral involvement of Liz Forgan, ACE’s national chair. First, a stream of emails has mysteriously appeared which point to a complex strategy – conspiracy? Of course not! – to get Wadley appointed. Now the lady herself has waddled on stage in this developing pantomime, showing through a column in the Spectator what we would be missing if she failed to get the job. ‘A waspish Hampstead shrink recently diagnosed Bradshaw as suffering from “malignant narcissist syndrome”’ she writes in the latest Spectator. ‘I think that’s far too grand’ she opines. In her view Bradshaw ‘doesn’t deserve serious analysis’. So instead she treats her readers to her unreconstructed Thatcherite view that arts organisations need to ‘monetise assets’ and warns, ‘Subsidy junkies take note’. Well, the job has been advertised again and she’s had a letter from someone, she doesn’t say who, ‘inviting me to re-apply for the chair’. Will she? Buoyed by having been ‘overwhelmed by support from London’s cultural leaders’, she lets on: ‘You bet’.

Morecambe has just opened at the Duchess, a delightful one man show which ingeniously gets overt the problem of the best loved comedian every having been half of a double act. But I gather Ernie Wise’s widow, Doreen, is less than amused that her beloved is being portrayed as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

A preview visit to Leighton House, the Kensington home built for himself by the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, which is due to reopen in the spring after a £1.6m refurbishment. It is the gloomiest place I’ve ever been in, everything painted in what a contemporary called ‘peculiar blue’ and actually a dark bottle green. Leighton was the only person ever to live in the sepulchral place, and I can understand why. When he died in 1896, three weeks after being made the only artist baron, his sisters couldn’t sell the enormous pile because it only had one bedroom. It has always been a supposed that the ‘aesthete’ Leighton never married because he was a closet gay, but there were rumours that he had fathered a child on one of his models. Now the refurb has disclosed a backstairs, leading straight into his capacious studio – still gloomy despite the large north-facing picture window – up which he seems to have smuggled the likes of Ada Alice Pullan, the alleged model for Leighton’s chum Bernard Shaw for Eliza in Pygmalion.

‘The paintings are dreadful’ said the Times of the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, ‘Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders’ according t0 the Observer; ‘neither eloquent nor commanding in their manipulation of paint, (the pieces) merely go backwards, spelling out a derivation’ said the FT. The critics, be assured, do not like Damien Hirst’s No Love Lost, Blue Paintings at the nationally-funded Wallace Collection until January 25. Now I hear the opprobrium is falling on the museum, and its director, for putting the exhibition on. It seems to come from the collecting quarter that thinks no painting is worth looking at until it’s 100 years old, and preferably by an Italian or French artist. I’m sure the chairman, John Ritblat, is turning a deaf ear to these moaning ninnies, but I hope he’s also turning on them and reminding them that this particular director, Dame Rosalind Savill, who has transformed the once quaint and little regarded collection in a niche of Fitzrovia that came into the national ownership almost by accident into a genuinely international resource with a series of gallery transformations and brilliantly unexpected exhibitions, including the enormously coup of a Freud show a couple of years ago. So what is she to do? The most celebrated living artist in the world, recognized by his peers who have elected him a member of the Royal Academy, who is best known for his sculpture comes along as asks if he can have an exhibition of his paintings. Does she say, ‘I think not, Mr Errum, not our sort of thing you know’? Like the stuff or not, these 25 daubings have brought more than twice the normal number of visitors to Manchester Square, something of which I hope Sir John is as proud of as he will be of Dame Rosalind’s new 18th century galleries due to open next year. And I’m sure he is aware that in the context of places like the Wallace, there is such a thing as dumbing up.

Kennedy’s move
The bombshell at the A&B Awards last night had nothing to do with any of the winners, or even Colin Tweedy’s speech (for him, pretty bland – is he anticipating political change?). No, it was the sudden announcement by the lady herself of the chair’s resignation. Helena Kennedy is leaving with immediate effect, one year into her second three year term, but even though she only told A&B two weeks ago I’m assured there’s no acrimony. ‘I think she wanted to clear her decks for another big job, either with this government or the next one, but she keeps her own counsel and no-one has any idea what it is’ says my source. It’s not the first tome the Labour peer has looked outside the A&B orbit for the next job: she was runner-up to Liz forgan to head up the Arts Council last year. Her interim replacement at A&B is Steven Williams, a director of Unilever and the man who engineered the hiuge Unilver sponsorship of the ongoing Turbine Hall exhibition programme at Tate Modern. One thing for sure it that she won’t be going back to the British Council, the chair of which is also currently vacant and which she left gto maker way for Neil Kinnock. After the experiences with the Bedwelty Kid I gather the word in Spring Gardens I ‘no more politicians’. Meanwhile, A&B are going to have to advertise, and probably hope that Williams applies – he was already on the A&B board and knows the ropes - and the Veronica Wadley doesn’t.

Forgan stirs it up
Another job Kennedy won’t be going for, then, is chair of Arts Council London, specially now that Forgan at ACE has upped the ante. Following Mayor Boris’s announcement that he won’t leave the post vacant after the debacle of Wadley, ex-editrix of the Standard and Boris cheerleader in chief in his election last year, but will go through the very possibly prolix appointment process, Forgan has imposed an interim chair. He is Ajay Chowdhry, the artistic director of Rented Space Theatre and CEO of the digital media company Enqii. Forgan didn’t ask for this situation, she was plunged into it by the leaked letter from her to Ben Bradshaw about the unsuitability of Wadley compared with the other candidates, but as they know at the BBC, the Guardian and HLF, she’s a feisty lady, and I gather that in her first week as the ACE’s new exec director of media etc, Alison Cole, has strongly advised her to cool it, but she stil felt constrained last night to declare at the TMA conference that she wouldnlt let the row dent the arm’s length principle, it was not a political issue, and ‘we should be allowed to get on with out jobs’…

Missing Boris
It was a busy night last night, and Boris chose to have a drinks party for journalists at his City Hall offices. Sadly, he hadn’t turned up after an hour and many left without the beneit of the mayor’s wisdom.

So much for black holes. We all followed up the story in The Times, then the Guardian, that DCMS had done a major ricket with its budget and was £100m short, almost certainly meaning the money promised to Tate Modern, the BFI for its Southbank development, the British Museum for its new conservation studios and Stonehenge for a visitor centre wouldn’t be forthcoming after all. Today DCMS announced confirmation of £45m for the BFI, £50m for the Tate Modern’s extension, £22.5m for the BM and £10m for Stonehenge. Oh, and there’s £33m for the British Library’s newspaper archive. I make that £160.5m, or a black hole of -£60.5m. But was here that we warned that the July story was more likely to be about a threatened Treasury clawback, which they’ve change their mind about.