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.

And so to happier things. The experiment Boris Johnson inherited with the Trafalgar Square Fourth lint has finished and it has been a great triumph. One & Other did everything that was expected of it, and more, and we can forget that the mayor was at first against it when he came to City Hall last summer. He wanted the conventional monument on the plinth, one dedicated to Sir Keith Park, the head of Fighter Command at the time of the Battle of Britain. But that’s a thing of the past, he was persuaded to go ahead with the competition to find
the artist to decorate the plinth and Antony Gormley won it, with Yinka Shonibare to follow, and so Yinka’s ‘Ship in a Bottle’ will be the next to delight us. Well, not exactly. The next piece of art to go up in Trafalgar Square will be… a bust of Sir Keith Park. It will go up on November 4 ‘to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War’, says his press officer. But fear not. Normal service will resume ‘in the middle of 2010’.

Cronyism isn’t nice but it had become a fact of life – barely an eyebrow was raised when Sue Woodford became chair of Arts Council London and would therefore have a big say in funding for the Southbank Centre, then chaired by her husband Clive Hollick – and the Nolan Rules about political interference were put in place to stop it. But perhaps they weren’t designed for BoJo. It is in the Mayor of London’s ‘gift’, as they liked to say as if he’s some kind of Medici, to appoint Lady Hollick’s successor, and he needn’t have consulted anybody. He wanted Veronica Wadley, who as editor of the Standard had been his cheerleader in his election campaign last year. He even mentioned it to Arts Council England chair Liz Forgan who apparently had no objection. But then he decided to make things fair and above board and suggested to the DCMS that they go through a short-listing process anyway, even though it was not necessary, and Ben Bradshaw agreed. A short listing committee was put together – Forgan, Johnson’s culture chief Munira Mirza and the former civil servant David Durie. They got together a long list of four to whittle down to three who would then be interviewed by two Greater London Assembly civil servants. So they wheeled in the four: Wadley; Patrick McKenna, who used to run the Really Useful Group; Tim Marlow, Sky’s voice of contemporary art and director of White Cube; and Nicholas Snowman, former boss at the Southbank, at Glyndebourne and now at Strasbourg Opera. Unsurprisingly, given the field, two of the board decided that Wadley was the least well qualified for the job. 0irza thought she was perfect, and so did Boris who threw his toys out of the pram when Wadley’s name duly didn’t go forward, insisting that an all male line-up was not acceptable (he’s very PS, Boris) she should be considered, and Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, accused him of breaching Nolan. Happily, I gather that Boris is now rowing back from his decision to leave the post vacant ‘until there’s a new culture secretary’.

News makes drama at the Pleasance Edinburgh starting tomorrow as part of the Fringe when A British Subject opens. It’s by the actor Nichola McAuliffe and tells of a British subject in the little sentenced to death in Pakistan for allegedly shooting a taxi driver. Prince Charles got involved, and an official visit was almost called off when the then Pakistani president climbed down. The freed man now lives somewhere in Surrey, but credit was given to Amnesty International for negotiating his release, when actually it was down to HRH and a conversation in a lift, according to the play. And how does McAuliffe, best known to telly viewers as the crusty lady sawbones in the sitcom Surgical Spirit, know so much about it? She happens to be married to the Daily Mirror reporter Don Mackay who ferreted the story out in the first place and stuck with it

Sad news from the campus at Dartington where musical adventurers are gathering for the give weeks of the Dartington Summer School. Gavin Henderson, the subject of the AI Profile last time, has resigned as director just as he celebrates 25 years in the job. He will stand down after next year’s summer school. He won’t talk about it, but it appears that the reason is that accommodation at the site is going to be effectively cut by more than a third. The 1,200 acre site is the base for the Dartington Hall Trust which runs a series of charitable programmes there, including the summer school, and it was where the progressive Dartington Hall School was founded in the 1920s by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst and it was the alma mater for the likes of Lucien Freud and Michael Young, founder of the Open University. It closed in 1987, but the college of arts continued and expanded, and Dartington it was a happy place for many years. Times have changed though, and the college cannot afford to stand-alone any longer, so is moving to join University College Falmouth. Accommodation for the summer school has always been problematic, and when the school closed became student accommodation providing 160 beds; now it’s to be converted into retirement homes, and that will mean trimming the summer school dramatically. It means Henderson won’t be able to beat the record of the summer school’s fonder, William Glock, who was its director for 30 years.

The Sustain awards – the first handouts from the £40m pot the Arts Council set up in June as a hedge against the effects of recession for RFOs - were pretty good news for the ten who got some cash out of it this week, but ACE were rather selective in the way they put the story out. The press release actually announced five of them, mostly comfy regional organisations – Ikon in and the dance Consortium in Birmingham, Nottingham Playhouse, South Hill Park in Bracknell, and together they didn’t get as much as th e fifth on the list, ENO. What isn’t in the press release, and you have to persevere through links and references to find them, is that other five are nearly all are very big fish: the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, plus British Youth Opera and the Derby-based Sinfonia Viva. And of the £4m dished out, more than £3m has gone to ENO, the ROH, WNO (which also got £300,00 from the Welsh Arts Council) and the RPO which will not be lost on those who watch ACE’s alleged preoccupation with its big favourites first out with the begging bowl, and the Great Wen. There were 87 applications, and more grants are coming this month and next, but two have actually been turned down: New Writing North in Newcastle and the Everyman in Cheltenham, we’re not told why or how much the wanted.

Buckingham Palace have opened a summer exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth, with a display of the stuff she and HRH have been handed over the years, the clothes she wore. As to th e latter, the couture doesn’t seem to have changed since 1953 when she became head of the Commonwealth, if the waistline has, but the gifts… ‘Oh darling, do look. It’s… a lacquered crocodile’. There are also fabulous gems in imaginative jewellery, and nice selections of boomerangs and things me from rocks. But the nicest, for me, is a bus a couple of feet long made out of scraps of metal, given to her by the Pakistani High Commissioner’s drivers in 1997. It’s brilliantly painted, and on one side they’ve portrayed HM looking suspiciously like Mrs Gandhi, and her consort as nothing so much as the villain in Slum Dog Millionaire.

An erstwhile colleague in his Guardian days where he was the arts correspondent went on to greater things as the great Milton Shulman’s worthy successor as drama critic of the Evening Standard, and he’s retired from Fleet Street so the Critics Circle gave him lunch at L’etoile. It is, of course, Nicholas de Jong who has found new fame as a playwright himself with Plague Over England, and was that afternoon to sign a film contract. Nick has a Bodleian full of anecdotes, but he gave us his favourite which comes not from his career but from his school. The ‘seriously stupid’ headmaster had invited Dame Edith Evans to be the guest at the annual speech day, and turning to her idly asked if she had ever played Lady Macbeth. ‘N-n-nevah!’ she expostulated in her finest ‘uh hairndbairg…?’ style; the fool persevered – why not, he asked? ‘Because I could not play a woman with such a peculiar notion of hos-pitaliteah!’

But while we’re on the subject of the aforementioned black hole, what is this story? It looks like the most appalling incompetence, and maybe it is, but it was covered first apparently after a conversation with a minister, and again even more prominently after more conversations with ‘senior arts sources’ – and no-one has resigned, no-one has been sacked, the spokesman’s quote hadn’t changed from one piece to the other. Off the record comments from DCMS are no more enlightening, muttering about the recession, global tightening, or in other words ‘we don’t know”. Could it be that it’s got nothing to do with DCMS at all, that the real dunderhead isn’t in Cockspur Street at all but further down Whitehall?