So because of all that going downstairs with the Bolivarmania, it was almost impossible to get to the lifts to take me to the Lynch party. It was crowded and warm in the eighth floor pavilion as the speeches started, with Lynch’s nervous successor Alan Bishop finding himself having to ’stand on a giant’s shoulders’, and ‘with great humidity’ take over from him. Alan Davey, now head of ACE but back in 2002 doing his first duty as the new DCMS head of culture in interviewing Lynch, said he knew ‘he was the one’ because of the way he’d noticed him walking along the street swinging the cane he has to carry, and even dropping it a couple of times. And then Michael himself relating how he had been warned by the lady he was staying with as he left for the interview that demonstrators were threatening to attack anyone wearing a tie, and having visions of himself, as he crossed Blackfriars Bridge, being found hanging under it by his neckwear as ‘God’s banker’ Roberto Calvi had done. He had words of praise for colleagues, but none more glowing than for Kenelm Robert, the head of customer relations at the RFH, who got an MBE at New Year but whose much greater accolade was to be dubbed ‘a really nice bloke’ by the boss. Not a good bloke was the Standard’s Norman Lebrecht who had been offended by the number of Australians getting top arts jobs here, and called for them to be sent back. ‘I see he’s not here’ said Lynch peering over our heads. ‘That’ll because I didn’t ask him’.

And his words follow him. His interview for AI last time has been picked up by all the national press, the BBC and even the Australian media. For his trials in achieving the impossible and getting the RFH done? For his tribulations dealing with English Heritage who wouldn’t have the lift he insisted on, or for coping with the asbestos, or for the sudden £18m hike in the bill? For his lessons in governance? Of course not, it was for calling bankers ‘a bunch of bastards’ for not contributing to the RFH development fund. And he reports back that as he got on the plane on Thursday he was cheered by the cabin staff, most of them ex-bank employees.

Pitmen profit
The hit play Pitmen Painters, currently delighting sell-out houses at the Lyttelton, features one of the character doing a lightning sketch of another, in full view of the audience. The actor is Ian Kelly, a bit of a polymath who is a graduate of Cambridge and the UCLA Film School as well as a biographer of the likes of Beau Brummel and Casanova. But if you’re wondering what happens to the drawings after the curtain comes down, you need only saunter past the National theatre ship on your way out. They are for sale at £40 a go.

Working La Sistema
At long last British audiences are gong to be treated once more by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which wowed the Proms three years ago. They and their director Gustavo Dudamel, products of Venezuela’s much envied La Sistema which gives money and years to training poor kids to become accomplished musicians, are to take up residence at the South Bank Centre. Watch out for them in April.

Hughes’s lost story
An interesting discovery comes to light at the Orange Tree Theatre later in the month when Georges Schehadé’s The Story of Vasso opens. It is the lost adaptation of the late Ted Hughes who had been commissioned to write an opera libretto of the piece, written by the French playwright in the 1950s and loosely based on the Algerian war. It was discovered by the production’s director, Adam Barnard, in a batch of Hughes’s papers which were being archived by the Emory University of Atlanta. ‘There was page after page of material, much of it written in Hughes’s own hand, that no-one had seen for years. Hughes’s imagination was clearly sparked by the source material, but his is a very free adaptation” he says. ‘While the original is in prose, his is in verse, and while he roughly follows Schehadé’s story, the dialogue is substantially different.’

French leaving
Sadly, Adam Gatehouse’s adventure with Festival de Valloires has come to an end. After three years, Gatehouse – the subject of a 20 Minute profile here two year ago – has had to call it a day for the summer event in the gorgeous medieval Picardy abbey because of the recession and the decision of French authorities to discontinue grants. He won’t be idle, though: he is also also editor of Live Music at BBC Radio 3 and executive producer of the BBC’s Wigmore Hall lunchtime concerts.

The governance conference organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme sounds like one of those worthy but seriously dull events enjoyed by nobody but the organisers, but this was different: it’s thrown up fundamental faults in the running of the arts in this country, and specifically about the relationship between board chairs and chief executives. The idea is, of course, that the two enter into a blessed marriage of the kind, we’re told, enjoyed by Wylie Longmore and John McGrath at Contact Theatre in Manchester. But that’s a rare good one, it seems. In national museums, particularly, if you think about it, the fall-out has been spectacular, with the last three directors of the V&A, the last director of the Natural History Museum, of the Science Museum, of the National Gallery and the National Maritime all unexpectedly resigning or not being reappointed by chairs brought in from outside, mostly from business, with little or no knowledge of the cultural sector. The only place where it seems to have worked the other way was at National Museums Liverpool where David Fleming got the better of Loyd Grossman last year. The natural question is, where is DCMS in all of this mayhem? Aside, as ever, even though appointments to nationally subsidised cultural organisations are normally by the government. But if you thought that common sense was beginning to prevail, the madness is spreading into the foundations sector, apparently, with the sudden firing of David Barrie. He staunchly will say nothing, beyond the party line that ‘17 years is long enough, time to find new challenges’, but the word is that he has not been as one with his chair, the old Etonian banker David Verey, since he took over in 2004. The conference story about Verey is that he was asked whether headhunters should be called in to find Barrie’s successor and responded ‘Why? We know everybody, don’t we?’ Meanwhile, the awarding of the Art Fund Prize for museums, always a May presentation, which Barrie championed, is to be held on June 16 - a fortnight after Barrie has left.

A truly historic moment with the decision by Nick de Jong to retire as theatre critic of the Evening Standard. He succeeded a legend, Milton Shulman, and became one himself if only for the fear and loathing he engendered among theatre directors - mostly, it must be said, not very good ones. It was a surprise that he had written a play, even more of one that it was particularly good - where did he get the time? - and astonishing that it should have been as spectacularly successful as Plague Over England has become, with film rights currently being negotiated. His departure has nothing whatever to do with the arrival of the Standard’s new editor, Geordie Greig, of course. The two know eachother well - their careers overlapped briefly when De Jong was the arts correspondent of The Guardian and Greig was doing the same job at the Sunday Times. No drama there, then.

Interesting trend that the wives of our leaders should be taking on a role as mentors of the cultural community. Mrs Darling, the chancellor’s wife, is the latest to have summoned leaders of the arts world to informal discussion about how to carry the arts through the recession, but I wonder if she had the right guest list. Christopher Frayling is the former chairman of the Arts Council, John Tusa the ex-managing director of the Barbican, and Jenny Abramsky no longer the head of BBC Radio…

Nice to know that after 14 years of existence, the London Gay Symphony Orchestra is finally getting acceptance by the arts establishment. On May 2 they are to make their Festival Hall debut - albeit in a rather aslant way, to perform the European premiere of Sing for the Cure, a symphonic song cycle chronicling stories of breast cancer survivors, as part of the Various Voices festival. But it’s a start, even if a late one, and you can hear how good they really are six days earlier when they will be essaying Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Poulenc a few yards from the RFH at St John’s Church, Waterloo.