Where’s Nandy? The riddle of Andy Burnham’s ‘oddly absent’ Culture Secretary

Lisa Nandy’s tenure as Culture Secretary got off to a bad start. In the days after the 2024 election, the great and the good of the sector convened at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for an introduction to their new Cabinet minister.

Nandy kept the chairmen and chief executives of Britain’s leading museums, galleries and sports bodies waiting for so long that it was left to Chris Bryant, then a junior minister, to “ad lib” to fill the time, someone in the room recalled. “She breezed in and said, ‘Sorry, we were caught in traffic,’ and then left after about 20 minutes,” says another who was there. “She should have found a way of juggling the next meeting so she spent enough time there, I think.” (A source close to Nandy said that all Cabinet ministers have “unavoidable diary delays”.)

For many who had descended on Whitehall only to come away a little disappointed, it set the tone for the years to come. Nandy, 46, is widely regarded in the sector as being unenthusiastic about the job: not across her brief, hazy on policy, and unwilling or unable to get out and meet leaders in her patch or attend the glitzy events to which she is invited as “Minister for Fun”.

Before Andy Burnham breezed into Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time last month, very few people expected Nandy to remain as Culture Secretary. That group included, according to sources who saw her in the days before Burnham’s reshuffle, Nandy herself. Instead of being moved to a new “super ministry” with responsibility for housing and devolution, or promoted to Energy Secretary, she stayed put at a DCMS that has been beefed up to include responsibility for digital policy, telecoms and online safety, which will take up much of Nandy’s time.

The Telegraph has spoken to two dozen leaders in the creative industries about Nandy in recent days, most of whom were disappointed that she has remained in post. Almost all insisted on speaking on the basis of anonymity to protect their organisations and their relationships with the Government. Others have expressed concern about the ennoblement of arts executive Ruth Mackenzie so that she can become an arts minister (of which more later).

“Either she’s very lazy or she’s not interested,” says an arts grandee of the lesser-spotted Culture Secretary. “I don’t know which it is.” A museum boss says that Nandy “doesn’t seem to enjoy” her job. “She always seems to be a bit miserable and acts like it’s a burden,” says one chief executive. A former minister says that she is “oddly absent”. Some complain that it is difficult to get her to sign off decisions, such as the appointment of board members, to the detriment of their publicly funded outfits.

It is rare to see the Culture Secretary at cultural events. For instance, it is understood that, despite being regularly invited to the BBC Proms – not just in London but in the North East of England, Bristol and Northern Ireland – over the past three summers, Nandy has not taken up the offer. Still, others say that they now simply do not expect to see her at the regular meetings of culture and sport bosses. “Seeing as 99 per cent of her department’s activities are delivered through arm’s-length bodies,” says one, “you’d have thought that, when you put all the chairs and chief executives of those bodies together in a room, you’d want to come along and talk to them.”

A frustrated arts boss sums it up: “Just turn up to some stuff. It’s an easy win.”

“It’s really odd. Most people in the arts are centre-Left,” says another source. “You have got to try quite hard to p--- off the Labour-supporting arts world.”

Team Nandy suggests that this is all just the bleating of largely London-based cultural elites who don’t understand the rest of the country. “This is absolute nonsense and the sort of snobbery that we were elected to oppose,” says a spokesman. “Arts and culture exist in every part of the country and belong to everyone.”

I am directed to her achievements since she took up her post: “securing the biggest long-term investment in arts and culture for a generation” in the form of a £1.5bn fund to support more than 1,000 cultural organisations across the country; the launch of the Town of Culture competition; and helping to bring the Bayeux Tapestry back to these shores for the first time in almost 1,000 years. “The Culture Secretary has widened access so every community can participate in our cultural life. This is a core belief for this Labour government and we will never apologise for it.”

Sources close to the Culture Secretary insist that she wanted to remain at DCMS, lobbied for its expansion, and does go to the theatre, but prefers to pay her own way instead of accepting freebies. Nandy does talk a good game about her love of the stage; her father, the Marxist academic Dipak Nandy, was a trustee of the National Theatre in the 1990s.

Discontent has swirled around Nandy for months. When Sir Keir Starmer was forced to reshuffle his Cabinet following the resignation in disgrace of Angela Rayner last September, there was chatter that Nandy could be moved and some disappointment that she was not. Criticism of Nandy even comes from those friendly to the Labour Government. The New World, a liberal pro-EU newspaper that was previously named The New European, published a piece about Nandy under the headline: “How is Lisa Nandy still in her job?”

But she does have her defenders. “My feeling is, given the circumstances, she’s done fine,” says a museum leader. “She spends a lot of time not in London – which is probably a good thing – and maybe that makes the people in London scratch their heads a bit. But I think this idea to make the arts more available to everybody is a good shout.”

Kate Varah, the co-chief executive of the National Theatre, says that Nandy is a “fantastic champion” of its work. “We are delighted the Secretary of State remains in post and we look forward to working with her in this new government to create opportunity through theatre nationwide.”

While DCMS has historically been seen as near the bottom of the ladder for aspiring ministers, Nandy has vital issues to tackle, such as BBC charter renewal, the future of Arts Council England, and whether the national museums and galleries should move away from universal free entry and charge foreign tourists.

If there was disappointment in the arts world when it was announced that Nandy would stay on as Culture Secretary, there was also some dismay at the appointment of Mackenzie. Unlike many ministers, she knows her patch intimately: the 69-year-old is an experienced arts executive who has held high-flying roles in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Australia.

She has what might politely be described as a patchy track record. During her tenure as general director of Scottish Opera from 1997 to 1999, the company risked collapse under the weight of £2.5m in debt. A damning report by the Scottish Parliament’s culture committee criticised the “arrogant” attitude of its management, who were “a disaster in terms of their financial management and the way they responded to a bad situation”, according to the then Labour MSP Mary Mulligan. At the time, Mackenzie criticised what she called the “untrue and unfair” allegations against her.

Other low points came in 2020, when she was sacked after three years as artistic director of the Parisian Théâtre du Châtelet opera house, in a move attributed to managerial and financial concerns (the theatre ran up a multi-million-euro deficit during her term). She also left the same post at Australia’s Adelaide Festival midway through her term.

“She did immense harm in Scotland… She almost single-handedly demolished opera in Scotland, not intending to do so, which is even more incompetent than if she had intended,” says an opera source. “Then she landed the job in Paris. Châtelet was a disaster. Then she went to Adelaide and was out within a year.”

Mackenzie has most recently been the director of arts at the financially troubled British Council. “She has presided over a number of catastrophes,” says the arts grandee. “She’s pretty low on personal skills and can cause mayhem with management teams… Normally, it has ended in tears. That means she’s probably not a great manager of people, but she’s a good convener of stuff, and, to be fair to her, she knows a lot about the arts.”

So why was she made a minister? A cynic may suggest that it helped her cause that both she and Burnham worked together as special advisers to former culture secretary Chris Smith in the first Blair government. “You’ve got a Culture Secretary who’s bone idle, and a minister for the arts who’s been appointed because of who she knows,” says one of my opera sources. “It’s really dismal.” DCMS says that Mackenzie “brings a wealth of experience, and her appointment as arts minister has been rightly welcomed”.

While Nandy is criticised by some in the arts for not going to glitzy opening nights in London’s West End, she may advise her detractors to read what Burnham wrote about his own tenure at the department. “I told my private office that I would be doing things differently and not going to Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells, as culture secretaries are expected to do,” Burnham wrote in Head North, a book he co-wrote with Liverpool city region mayor Steve Rotherham that was published two years ago. “Instead, I would be spending the year in Liverpool.”

Burnham spent just 18 months at DCMS before being moved to the health department. Nandy has eclipsed that tenure and, despite having served in post for a little over two years, is the longest-serving culture secretary since Jeremy Hunt in 2010. “The sector used to complain that at every reshuffle they got a new culture secretary,” says a former minister. “The sad irony is that the one that’s been kept is the one they’ve got to know the least.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]