6 1GT Friday November 13 2020 | the times
Stonehenge
road has
taken
an age
One of the most
delayed planning
decisions in British
history was finally
settled yesterday,
and I won’t be the
only hack heaving
an exhausted sigh
of relief. In the
36 years I’ve been
covering culture
for The Times
25 schemes for
rerouting the A
at Stonehenge have
come and gone. In
July, however, we
were promised that
by November 13
the government
would finally,
irrevocably, decide
whether to proceed
with the latest
£2 billion plan to
bury the road in
a tunnel. And
yesterday it was
indeed approved.
This incredible
saga of ministerial
flipflopping
reminds me of
Tommy Cooper’s
line: “I used to be
indecisive, but now
I’m not so sure.” I
just rejoice that I
have grandchildren
who might, some
time in the late
21st century, knock
all of ten minutes
off their journey
to Cornwall by
driving through
the newly built
tunnel, costing
only 30 times what
those idiots in 2020
said it would.Richard Morrison the arts column
The art of fundraising: it helps if you learn to love rich people
EAMONN M MCCORMACK/GETTY IMAGESI
was thinking today about the
Inquisition, as one does. It wasn’t
all thumbscrews and boiling oil.
It also deployed a more subtle
torment called “torture through
hope”. A prisoner was allowed
to escape, smell fresh air and
taste freedom, only to be
surrounded by guards and experience
the spirit-crushing realisation that the
whole thing was a trick. Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam wrote a chilling short
story about it, La torture par
l’espérance, if you fancy a nice
grim read. In French.
Which brings me to the vaccine. The
possibility that it could end the Covid
nightmare has rightly generated
euphoria. My worry is that, for the
arts, this could be the 2021 equivalent
of torture through hope; an apparent
“get out of jail” card that turns out to
be just a more prolonged path to
oblivion. Let me explain why, then
suggest one way for arts organisations
to help themselves to survive.
The first problem is that, after
March, the £1.57 billion Cultural
Recovery Fund will be spent. With
luck, mass vaccination will be well
underway and entertainment venues
properly open again. That doesn’t
mean the arts are home and dry.
Far from it.
Every economist predicts that
Covid will have a “long tail”. For years
to come governments will have to
slash public spending, including arts
subsidies, to service 2020’s massive
debts. The private sector, focused
on survival, will cut all inessential
spending, including what remains of
arts sponsorship. And many charitable
trusts will have exhausted their
reserves on Covid projects.
All that could produce an economic
climate so icy it makes the “austerity
years” of the past seem like a stroll
in a rose garden. On top of that, arts
organisations will need to rebuild
audiences and invest in streaming.
Where will the money come from?
One answer is philanthropy. In the
US it raises billions. In the UK, by
contrast, very wealthy people have
been lamentably stingy. The median
level of charitable giving among
high-net-worth individuals (HNWI)
in Britain is 66p a day. Yup, the same
as buying someone a KitKat. And arts
donations have almost collapsed
during Covid — down 35 per centWell, the London Symphony
Orchestra has found a pair of them.
The LSO’s recovery appeal, aimed at
raising £5 million by next summer,
has been kickstarted by a donation of
£1.5 million from a youngish married
couple, Elena and Alex Gerko. Both
Russian-born, they live in London
with a net worth estimated at a
tolerable £500 million.
She’s a Bank of England
economist. He’s a mathematician
who founded a company, XTX
Markets, that trades £200 billion of
stocks, currencies and commodities
each day without a single human
trader. It’s all done by massive
computing power, fiendish algorithms
and brilliant techies who work out
of a nerdishly hip office in King’s
Cross, furnished with a replica Apollo
11 command module.
The Gerkos have previously
donated to maths schools and the
social-mobility charity Sutton Trust.
And this year XTX gave £21.5 million
to organisations doing Covid-related
work (Alex Gerko cited a “moral
responsibility” for successful
companies to help to alleviate the
crisis), but this is the first time the
couple have made a big arts donation.
What persuaded them?It obviously helped that they were,
in their own words, “avid LSO
concertgoers for over 15 years”. It
was also important, however, that
the orchestra has always made its
donors feel part of the LSO family.
As Kathryn McDowell, its managing
director, puts it: “There’s still a lot of
money out there, particularly in the
financial sector. You just have to work
on forging long-term relationships
with potential philanthropists.”
It’s that last bit that arts people
appear to find difficult. Often British
cultural organisations seem more
intent on finding reasons for rejecting
donors and sponsors than recruiting
them. I don’t just mean reasons such
as links to fossil fuels. There also seems
to be a deep suspicion of wealth itself.
I have just read the latest report
from the Beacon Collaborative, an
organisation that encourages British
HNWIs to become philanthropists.
One line stayed in my mind: “It
seems that fundraisers sometimes
struggle to see past the money to
the individuals behind it — to
understand what motivates them and
also what the wealthy feel they are
bringing to the table.” If the arts are
to survive the “long tail” of Covid, that
needs to change fast.In the UK we
can seem better
at rejecting than
recruiting donors
in the first nine months of 2020, and
75 per cent in June to September,
according to a new TRG Arts report.
Of course, some British HNWIs
are magnificent exceptions. I was
delighted but not surprised to see
Vivien Duffield’s Clore Duffield
Foundation — which has given tens
of millions to the arts — responding to
Covid by donating another £2.5 million
to relaunch community programmes
in 66 arts organisations.
Duffield, though, is a scion of the old
guard — a characterful array of first
and second-generation immigrants
(think Paul Hamlyn, Isaac Wolfson
and Duffield’s dad, Charles Clore)
whose affection for Britain was such
that they kept our cultural institutions
going through the 20th century. We
desperately need to find their
21st-century successors.Banging the drum for philanthropy:
the LSO in Trafalgar Square,
London, in 2016