As the Standard's Louise Jury reported yesterday:
Former Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley has been appointed to a top-level arts panel weeks after being rejected as the best candidate to chair the Arts Council in London. Arts and Business, an independent body which receives annual Arts Council funding of £4 million to forge links between the two sides, has named her as one of 40 leaders in commerce and culture on its newly-formed advisory council.
The mission of Arts and Business, summarised here, is to bring the private sector and the cultural realm together in mutually beneficial ways. The advisory council is very recently formed and its inaugural gathering took place last Thursday, chaired by Richard Sambrook of the BBC.
Such events will happen only twice a year, though. Arts and Business explained to me that the council is mostly "an informal group" founded and assembled to ensure that the organisation has access to the widest possible range of appropriate expertise. How do you get to join?
"There is no application procedure, as such," it was explained. Rather, those offered membership were chosen by chief executive Colin Tweedy and two of Arts and Business's Directors and Charity Trustees, Mark Austen and Peter Wallis, the latter better known as the social commentator Peter York.
I was told, though, that Wadley was brought to these gentlemen's attention by FutureCity founder Mark Davy, another member of the council - it seems they have a common concern for the future of Battersea Power Station.
Membership of the council may not tax Wadley unduly, but with Mayor Johnson soon to announce a re-run of the selection for the Arts Council (ACE) in London job, it will help improve the arts credentials part of her cv, which two of her three initial interviewers were unimpressed by, just as they were by her performance in person.
It would, of course, be better if she had further and more powerful positions to her name: a place on, say, the board of the Olympic Park Legacy Company would have been handy. But all this is of pretty marginal relevance to the re-run of the appointment procedure if the progress of the first one is any guide.
To recap, Boris's culture adviser Munira Mirza was alone among the three initial interviewers in believing that Wadley should go forward to a second and final interview with the Mayor himself. Boris, though, insisted on interviewing Wadley anyway and Mirza later argued in a letter to the relevant London Assembly committee and in statement to me that the opinion of one of those three present, Sir David Durie, didn't count because his role – providing an "independent element" – did not include judging the merits of the candidates. He did not meet her definition of "a panellist."
Sir David later acknowledged that he could not conclude that Wadley would "necessarily be incapable of coming up to the mark," but added that he felt "strongly that this whole process has been a considerable waste of time and effort."
If the re-run's initial interview panel again includes Mirza as one of only two members whose opinion of the candidates counts, it is hard to imagine that Wadley won't again progress to the second interview stage. It is equally hard to imagine that she won't emerge from that second interview as Boris's nomination, just as she did the first time round.
The only likely difference is that by then Jeremy Hunt will have become, or be close to becoming, a David Cameron government's successor to Ben Bradshaw as culture secretary. Wadley's contested claim to the ACE in London job was endorsed by Hunt on Radio 4's Front Row on Wednesday. He said that he considered Boris's attempt to install her had been fully in accordance with Nolan principles. "I believe what he did was perfectly proper," he added. These comments indicate that he would have no problem with approving Wadley as Boris's nomination for the post
Given all this, the only surprise will be if anyone else even bothers to apply for it.
