‘£100m funding black hole threatens major arts projects’; ‘British Museum and Tate plans could be shelved as funds run dry’. What’s the difference between these two headlines? Not a lot, you might think, but there are two key ones. One is that the first comes the Guardian, the second from the Times. The other difference is that the Guardian piece was splashed on the front page yesterday, July 23; the Times article was tucked away inside… exactly a week earlier, on July 26. Otherwise, the stories are materially the same: the DCMS has found that cash promises it made to national capital arts projects might not be fulfilled because the government has found itself with a £100m shortfall. How does that happen? Not the shortfall, that’s happening all across the façade of this crumbling government – on the same day as the Guardian’s arts black hole the Daily Telegraph had found one in the education budget for exactly the same amount; somebody else’s incompetence, then, not DCMS. But dos it happen that a story that was given some considerable space in one national paper one day appears again in another paper a week later, with clearly different by-lines. Could it be that we’re spending so much time on our blogs, Facebooks, Twitters and the rest of it, there isn’t any left to read the newspapers?

Auntie has decided she wants a TV arts editor to stand alongside her business, economics and sports editors. No idea who’s in for it, but some obvious names will pop up – arts correspondent Razia Iqbal, of course, Nick Higham no doubt, and probably the enthusiastic Front Row anchorman John Wilson. Rumour is, though, that she wants a big name from outside the Beeb, the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins, say, but who would want it? Another of Auntie’s underlings tells me they’d be on a hiding to nothing, ‘trailing all over the world looking for stories and then having to compete with the likes of Peston for space on Ten to get them on air – drive you bonkers’.

The artistic provenance of the new culture secretary remains a mystery. Gathering the hacks associated with his range of briefs – arts, sport, broadcasting principally – Ben Bradshaw told us how pleased he’d been when he got the call from Brown while he was in his Exeter constituency. It was quite a long conversation, it seems, and he didn’t have time to say much he said. So it wasn’t till the PM had hung up that Ben could punch the air and say “Yes! Wimbledon!”

Stephen Deuchar’s decision to leave running Tate Britain to take over as director of the Art Fund seems puzzling. He was a surprise choice when he was brought from the National Maritime Museum 12 years ago and since then he’s driven a pretty straight course through what can be a minefield of tricksy exhibitions, dodgy attributions and controversial sponsorships, and can be regarded as a bit of a catch for AF chair David Verey, who might find his new CEO less of a personal challenge than the previous one. Who could replace Deuchar at Millbank though? Nick Serota has a penchant for foreigners, but it might be the opportunity to bring Sandy Nairne back into the fold from the NPG for which he left off being Serota’s number two seven years go. Them who for the NPG? None better, you might think, than a certain David Barrie, who’s always wanted to run a national institution, to square a circle.

Andrew Whyte leaves the Arts Council next week, rather peremptorily it seems. The rumour is that he has been ousted by the new chair, Dame Liz Forgan, who is said to find him too susceptible to the disease of control freakery. In fact he has a big new job to go to, in the civil service proper as director of communications at DEFRA on about the same pay scale, so it’s hard to see how it is a move up. The truth is that in his three years he has both presided over ACE’s acknowledged biggest PR disaster, the funding cuts of 08, and the biggest opening to information from and about the Arts Council since Anthony Everitt was secretary general a generation ago. And if it hadn’t been for the latter, the former would not have happened.

A splendid dinner at Whitgift, the public school in South Croydon, to celebrate the 500th anniversary marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The table decorations are of red and white roses with pomegranates, Catherine’s badge; the wine is English and Spanish; and the music is by the schools own 16th century ensemble, complete with a unique shawm modelled on one found with the Mary Rose. For the dinner is more realistically to celebrate the exhibition the school has on of finds from the Mary Rose wreck. How the headmaster Christopher Barnett managed to persuade the Mary Rose Trust to put this show on is a mystery, but he did and the result would not disgrace a national museum. The real question is, why can’t it be seen anywhere else? Surely to tour it around the country to places where state school pupils could see these extraordinary artefacts – including the heads of the bosun and gunner reconstructed from their skulls – wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of the state, and seems to be exactly the kind of thing the newly retitled Creativity Culture & Education, formerly Creative Partnerships, could spend some of its large resources on. The dinner was fabulous, but it needs be obligatory…

As if he hasn’t got enough to do running the Barbican’s arts programme and the City’s Olympic effort, Graham Sheffield has got another job. He is the British Council’s long-awaited advisor for arts and the cultural economy – and that will be a dual role, too. He will also chair the BC’s arts advisory group in the rejigging of the department by its still newish head, Rebecca Walton, which she hopes will assure the cultural communities here and aboard of the BC’s newly discovered commitment to the arts.

The strange “lost” Shakespeare play The History of Cardenio, based on a character from Cervantes’s Don Quixote which had been translated into English in 1612, only a few years before the Bard’s death, is getting an airing at Otterton Mill, the restaurant, shop, art gallery, craft ship and music venue near Sidmouth in Devon. There is no original script and the storyline appears to be based on not much more than hearsay, but so far as it is known it has been adapted by Bernard Richards and is being staged at the 1000-year-old mill by the appropriately named (read on) Alternative Cambridge Theatre Company on June 20. The date may seem salient – the day before Midsummer Night – and the play tells the story of four young folk, a libertine, an abandoned young woman, another who is pursued and man who has been betrayed in love. “The play fits snugly into the schema of a Shakespearean tragi-comedy with all the usual plot twists and turns before its final resolution” says the publicity. And the fact that it seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to a Shakespeare play written and performed at least a decade before this one could have been staged need not spoil your enjoyment of what promises to be a very jolly evening.

Endowments, once a rude word because of the length of time the cash had to sit idle before it was worth anything useful, are now the buzz in the arts as a hedge against recession. The London Symphony Orchestra has just launched its own with an extraordinary gesture from the band’s 81-year-old former principal conductor Colin Davis. He has expressed his love for the orchestra with which he has been associated for half a century by digging deep into his own pocket for “a significant amount of money”, the LSO, says, to set the ball rolling towards a £1m target.

Meanwhile, more help in the way of influential support may be on the way. I gather an All Party Parliamentary Group on Classical Music is about to be set up with the aim of becoming an “interface between British orchestras’ on and off-stage activities, the wider classical music industry, including broadcasters and the recording industry, and key decision makers and opinion formers”. Whatever that means, it can’t be bad, and it has the support of the Association of British Orchestras. The chairman is to be the Conservative MP Stephen O’Brien who, as well as being shadow health minister, is pretty nifty on the ivories and sees himself as a promising conductor, too, though he probably won’t be troubling Sir Colin’s reputation…

Banks are keeping a pretty low profile, but quietly their commitment to the arts is continuing and they are making good business use of it too. HSBC is sponsoring the British Museum’s Indian Summer and on the back of it are commitment not necessarily connected with the BM’s agenda. “Taking inspiration from the Indian Summer season we have developed a series of events and activities that will explore themes of life and work in India as a summer-long celebration of Indian culture” says the bank’s European boss who rejoices in the name of Zed Cama. As well as poster advertising, these cultural activities include business events and forums with the FT, partnerships with Indian business and cultural organisations, and cricket. So the arts really are at the top table now.