28.

On my first official morning as Chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I padded downstairs to collect the newspapers off the doormat. It is my routine to read them in the bath with a cup of coffee. The headline of the Daily Telegraph leapt out. It said: ‘V&A rejects Lady Thatcher’s gift of her clothes to the nation.’

There followed the startling information that the museum had ‘dissed’ Thatcher’s legacy, and several Tory MPs were quoted saying how appalled and outraged they were. It was the first I’d heard of it. Nobody had mentioned any snub to Mrs T. On the Radio 4 Today programme, Norman Tebbit was already at full throttle on the subject. He wasn’t the least bit surprised: the V&A is a notorious nest of lefties, he asserted. Boris Johnson was next man up: the museum had made a cataclysmic, ideological blunder.

I rang Martin Roth, but the Director was at a conference in Venice. He was frequently at conferences somewhere or other, often Rwanda. His office knew nothing about any Thatcher clothes. Paul Ruddock didn’t either. It was disconcerting. Meanwhile, every news organization in the world was piling in on the story. The Guardian and Independent were congratulating the V&A on their principled stand. The Daily Mail was fanning the outrage. The New York Times was ‘going big with it’, BBC News at One was rounding up further incensed MPs and wanted to film them sounding off inside the museum.

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was requesting an urgent briefing on our decision, as was Number Ten. After three hours, I still couldn’t find a soul at the museum who knew anything about it. I rang Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph columnist and Thatcher biographer, for any lowdown. He made swift enquiries.

It seemed that, five or six years earlier, at a big dinner held at the British Museum, Lady Thatcher’s executor, Sir Julian Seymour,fn1 had floated the possibility of the V&A one day taking some of her dresses for the archive. He had been chatting over coffee to one of the museum team. She hadn’t mentioned the overture to the Director. That was it. The museum had never rejected the bequest, nor even considered it, because they hadn’t known about it.

Carol Thatcher rang me from a ski resort. ‘Cripes, Nick,’ she said, ‘what’s all this codswallop about Mummy’s old clothes? You haven’t been offered any.’

But the story was too good to die, it was unstoppable. It ran and ran. To this day, we are variously applauded or condemned for spurning the Thatcher power suits, depending on who’s talking. Shortly afterwards, Julian Seymour and the Thatcher children kindly organized a gift of several of Lady T’s best outfits and some handbags, and these now live at the V&A, for anyone to inspect.

I found myself spending multiple hours a week on museum business, drawn deeper and deeper into the South Kensington vortex. Astoundingly, we were now working on five major building projects; headed by the half-completed Exhibition Road project, designed by the architect Amanda Levete,fn2 still a deep hole in the ground when I became Chairman. It was the most ambitious and expensive intervention in the museum’s history, a £54 million miracle of engineering, with a vast new underground Sainsbury Gallery inserted between two Grade I buildings, the new porcelain-tiled Sackler Courtyard above, and at the time, a yet-to-be-named and yet-to-be-paid-for new entrance hall. I stared down into the muddy abyss, four storeys deep, and wondered what would happen if the Aston Webb facade and the Henry Cole building toppled over into the excavations; it seemed all too possible.

Meanwhile, the V&A galleries in Shekou, in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, were rising above the Pearl River Delta. The new V&A in Dundee, a miraculous design like a ship in full sail by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, was rising over the Tay. (The locals were already calling it the V&Tay.) And, out on the Olympic Park, some initial (rather dreary) designs were being imagined for V&A East. Martin Roth and I made multiple visits to Stratford in East London, along with the Deputy Director, Tim Reeve, who was leading the charge. If you added together the cost of all these projects, they exceeded £300 million. It was mildly alarming.

I was summoned by Boris Johnson, still Mayor of London, to City Hall. He held strong opinions on what the new V&A East should look like, and wanted to make sure I was fully on side. His vision was a million miles from the brief already issued by his team to the architects, and he was in classic, barnstorming, Boris form.

‘We don’t want some stunted, Eastern Bloc, Communist state, post-Corbusian monstrosity. What we want is a cross between the British Museum and the V&A in South Kensington, something magnificent rising above the Olympic Park. We want Corinthian columns. We want Ionic pillars. We want the Babylonian Palace of Tiglath-Pileser! That’s what we’re after, Nick. That’s the vision. I hope you’re with me on this.’

Sitting behind the Mayor, the representatives of the London Legacy Development Corporation looked increasingly anxious, and began muttering about budgets and the ‘public realm’. They communicated with the Mayor as though he was the slightly wilful eight-year-old child of a maharaja, who needed humouring. There was much appeasing laughter.

Boris replied, ‘Budgets, budgets … we’re all in favour of budgets. If we need more money, we’ll find it. Remind me to call Michael Bloombergfn3 and Lakshmi Mittal.fn4 In fact, get me Lakshmi on the phone now. No, I’ll call him myself, he’s on this mobile somewhere.’ Boris began punching numbers on the speed dial. ‘Hello? Hello? Lakshmi? Is that you? Boris here. Where are you, I hear music? Ibiza? Yikes, Lakshmi, are you in a disco, you old swinger? Now, look here, Lakshmi, I’m going to need your help …’

I was getting to know Martin Roth better, and liked him a lot. He was tentative and diffuse, his mind veering off in several directions at once, but clever and international in temperament. He and his wife, Harriet, came to stay at Wolverton, and we saw a more relaxed side to him. We had breakfast together once a month in a hotel, to chew over the museum.

One summer morning he came to visit me in Vogue House. He spoke for an hour about this and that, but I sensed there was something he wasn’t yet saying; he was working up to it. At last, he blurted, ‘I want to quit the museum.’

‘Why on earth?’

He waved his hand in the air. All sorts of reasons, family reasons, their children lived far away in Berlin and Vancouver. ‘My job here is done.’ Harriet was lonely in London. Other projects … It was a long list.

Martin was flying to Canada the next day on holiday, I was flying with my family to Iran. I tried to persuade him not to resign, to think about it. ‘If you did leave, do you have a date in mind?’

‘Two weeks?’ said Martin.

‘That’s insane. You have a six-month rolling contract.’

We agreed to keep it quiet until after our respective holidays, but discussed a tentative announcement for the autumn. I informed the Board.

On the eve of our announcement, it leaked in the Sunday Times. ‘V&A’s German Director resigns in protest over Brexit.’

Martin rang me at dawn. ‘It has nothing to do with Brexit. I honestly don’t know where that came from.’

But, as the week unfolded, Martin rather warmed to the Brexit narrative, and the positive reaction it was getting in the arts community, and was soon running with it. He gave interviews about a growing xenophobia across Europe and the perils of nationalism, and soon the Brexit referendum result became the only reason for his resignation. He departed the V&A in glory, the museum having just been named Museum of the Year. Tragically, he died of cancer within months, though he only became aware of the illness after he left the museum.

There are multiple strands to a national museum’s mission, each prioritized by different clusters.

For many curators, the care and acquisition of the collections is the overriding purpose; scholarship and study. The impulse to add more objects to their department’s archive, to plug gaps, to accrue more treasures, can be a craving close to kleptomania. They pore over catalogues from auction houses, butter-up collectors, thrilling to the chase. Every couple of months, a new piece will be identified – a rare print, a precious scroll, a Qing Dynasty bowl – and declared ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity to acquire’. Then the Development team cranks into action, seeking a willing philanthropist to fund the purchase.

But other groups see the museum’s primary mission as educational, galvanizing schoolchildren with our treasures. Or industrial, inspiring the next generation of manufacturers and designers. The government tends to evaluate the success of museums and galleries by visitor figures, as tangible evidence of taxpayers’ money hitting the spot, so crowd-pleasing exhibitions are always front of mind.

I quickly came to love the intrigues which incubate around museums, the politics and courtships to secure this treasure or that, frequently in direct competition with other suitors; sagas played out in multiple acts.

The saga of Clive of India’s flask – the gold, jade, emerald and ruby carafe presented to Robert Clive after the Battle of Plassey – and the threat of its export from the V&A to Qatar and the Doha Museum of Islamic Art, was a gold-plated saga, involving whispery meetings with sheikhs and princes from Paris to Hyderabad.

One sheikh was so concerned that the hotel butlers serving tea might be eavesdropping on our conversation that we whispered to each other behind a hedge beyond his private swimming pool, plotting and planning.

There was the successful intrigue over Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet, designed as an engagement present to his wife by Prince Albert, saved from export to Singapore and now in pride of place in the Bollinger jewellery gallery. The V&A jewellery curator, Richard Edgcumbe, played a decisive role.

There was the episode surrounding the Fabergé gift from the Snowman family of Wartski, and the episode of the Harewood House Chippendale tables and pier glass mirrors. All these unfolding goings-on fed my affection for the museum. And, every day, newer acquisitions were arriving: rare copies of the Oz ‘Schoolkids’ issue; Grayson Perry’s Brexit vases; a vast brutalist chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, the demolished housing estate in Poplar, East London; Beyoncé’s ‘Papillon’ ring; Tommy Cooper’s ‘gag file’ of jokes; Hoefnagel’s 1568 watercolour of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace; Prince the rock star’s black satin shoes …

We embarked on a process to find a new Director, working with the search firm Saxton Bamfylde. In Britain, anyone can apply to be Director of a national museum and, as the applications rolled in, it became clear that almost everyone had. Hearing there was a vacancy at the top of the V&A, random people all over the world had eureka moments, thinking, ‘I could be the new Director. Why not me?’

Antiques dealers, curators, National Trust tour guides, museum Directors from Holland to Houston, all gave it a whirl. I took the complete set of files of applicants home to read over the weekend. The top one in the pile was from a cinema usher at a Vue cinema in the West Midlands; he had no experience at all, beyond guiding people to their seats with his torch. He didn’t see this as a problem, he would be bringing ‘fresh eyes’. Another applicant said she worked in a crab shack near Polzeath, but ‘fancied a change of scenery’. Other candidates were more plausible.

In the end, there were 22 credibles, 10 strong and 6 very strong, including wild cards. Our appointments committee comprised three Trustees (Mark Damazer, the academic Professor Margot Finn, McKinsey’s Nick Hoffman), me and Dame Sue Owen, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, whom I hadn’t met properly before, but liked on sight. Compact, dynamic, with a Twiggy-style bob, she packs a punch. Six candidates became three, three became two. Curatorial skills versus management experience, reliability versus risk, corduroy trousers versus metrosexual suit, communication skills, people skills, academic credentials, x-factor, all were weighed. All weekend, the debate raged on, but it was stalemate. One colleague argued against falling into the trap ‘of being seduced by a candidate’s charisma, charm and verbal skills’.

I called an extraordinary meeting of the whole V&A board, and both finalists had an hour to project their vision, followed by questions. Both performed strongly. I asked Trustees to go home and sleep on it, and send me their preferences by 4 p.m. the following day, a Saturday.

From 10 a.m., votes began to trickle in, then came in a rush. By teatime, we had chosen Dr Tristram Hunt, Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central, as the new Director. He had been Shadow Secretary of State for Education, and he resigned to Jeremy Corbyn a couple of days later, after his appointment at the museum had been ratified by the Prime Minister, Theresa May.

Tristram’s appointment was big news, front page of the broadsheets. It was a miracle there had been no leak, there could so easily have been: the DCMS, Downing Street, sixteen Trustees, several others who’d been canvassed for opinions and due diligence, were all in the know. By this point, I had met Tristram a total of four times, and each time been more impressed. His backlist of history books, including several on subjects of clear relevance to the V&A, his lectures at Queen Mary’s College, London University, his role in helping save the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston (now owned by the V&A), his presence and speaking skills, all boded well. And he struck me as realistic and pragmatic, and a listener, and a doer, and someone likely to click with the Keepers and curators, but also with philanthropists. All these things turned out, over time, to be true.

Boris Johnson had left City Hall for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and his successor as Mayor, Sadiq Khan, took a while to embrace the Olympic Park cultural project, partly on the grounds that it was Boris’s big idea. We spent months conniving with Sadiq’s Deputy Mayor for Culture, Justine Simons, to keep the project alive. Three times it came within a whisker of collapse, and three times it rose again from the dead. Everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong: funding crises, aesthetic crises, political crises over provision for affordable housing. But eventually, miraculously, it all fell into place. Boris’s suggested name for the district – ‘Olympicopolis’ – was quietly dropped as too elitist, and replaced by East Bank, which certainly isn’t, and the project rolled on.

V&A East’s architects, O’Donnell + Tuomey, came up with a new, innovative museum design, ostensibly inspired by a Balenciaga couture dress in the V&A fashion collection, but reminding me of Darth Vader’s helmet. There wasn’t a trace of a Corinthian column or Babylonian frieze in the whole scheme, but it has impact. In our competitive way, we wanted V&A East to be the standout building on the cultural strip, the one that gets chosen to illustrate every article about East Bank, the landmark elevation. And then, if things weren’t complicated enough already, we embarked on a scheme to move the V&A’s entire reserve collection of two million treasures from Blythe House in Olympia to new super-sleek, open-access storage in Stratford, close to V&A East. The New York High Line architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, were chosen to design a glorious new edifice, a glass-floored Tutankhamun’s tomb.

There is an informal network of museum Chairs, and I was grateful to be included, because it enabled me to pick up all sorts of nuances I wouldn’t otherwise have grasped. Sir Richard Lambert, whom I had known when he was editor of the Financial Times, was Chairman of the British Museum; a tall, friendly figure of distinction, who always correctly predicted the outcome of the next governmental spending review. Dame Mary Archer, Chair of the Science Museum, was impeccably turned out and organized; deceptively stern, but actually warm. We had a custom of visiting each other’s exhibitions as they opened – a Chairs’ tour with curator – and swapped intel about ministers between exhibits. Or else we met, in wider conclave, at regular Chairs’ breakfasts hosted by Sir Nicholas Serota at the Arts Council in Bloomsbury.

I accompanied Mary and Jeffrey Archer around the V&A Opera exhibition with a curator, and Jeffrey was in prime form. Spotting a small canvas by Degas on display of the interior of an opera box, he declared, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t ask to borrow my Degas of an opera scene? Nobody asked me.’ Then, turning to me, he said, ‘You probably know this already, young man, but one should always hang one’s best pictures on the walls of the lavatory. That’s what I do. My Degas and a Picasso, both in the loo. When friends visit us, I ask, “Did you like the Degas and the Picasso in the loo?” and, do you know, half the time they haven’t even noticed them. They’ve been right there in front of them, but they never noticed them.’

Hannah Rothschild, Chair of the National Gallery, became an ally. She had been friends for years with half the people I like, but I’d never really known her properly. We had hilarious breakfasts to discuss tricky philanthropists and tricky trustees; we share the same high-low interests in culture, writing and gossip. Rupert Gavin, Chair of Historic Royal Palaces, became another world of heritage friend.

I wanted to see every last square inch of the museum. With a map, I walked the seven miles of public corridors and found every gallery, then the offices, conservation studios, delivery bays and stores. A tour of the roof was arranged, along perilous metal walkways, offering sudden unexpected views of courtyards and glimpses through skylights of galleries far below. And then, clambering rusty iron ladders to the Aston Webb dome, tier upon tier, like scaling a wedding cake, you arrived at a deserted loggia with the best views across the rooftops of South Kensington. All that was up there were two empty cider cans and a Golden Wonder crisp packet drifting in the breeze.

I suppose I must have walked through the Cromwell Road entrance of the V&A more than a thousand times now, but you need to stop and properly look to fully appreciate it. Surely no public building will ever again be designed and built with this level of decoration and sculptural ornament? I love the sequence of thirty-two figures of British luminaries, each in niches: painters, sculptors, craftsmen and architects. Constable, Millais, Turner, William Morris, Chippendale, Wren, Wedgwood and G. F. Watts are just some of them. And the statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by St George and St Michael, high above the recessed entrance, and the statue of Prince Albert below, and the statues of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. And, carved into the arch, the great quotation from Sir Joshua Reynolds which acts as a museum mission statement: The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.

New Trustees joined the board, having somehow negotiated the tortuous process to appointment. Ben Elliot, the boss of Quintessentially, was a fearless fund-raiser and much else. Steven Murphy, the former CEO of Christie’s, became our point-man on Chinese philanthropists, Nigel Webb of British Land a vital expert on commercial property. Lynda Nead, the Pevsner Professor of Art History at Birkbeck, was another good academic hire. Caroline Silver, Mark Sebba and Nick Hoffman kept us on the financial straight and narrow, and usefully curbed our buccaneering tendencies without smothering them. A slick Amex executive, Robert Glick, chaired the Commercial Development Committee.

Having been raised in the Condé Nast school of spontaneous decision making, where everything was done on instinct, and no Audit Committee held you to account for rotten decisions, I was struck by the precision, process and ‘terms of reference’ of a national institution. The Chairman’s role, I felt, was to moderate between the risk-adverse and the too risky lobbies, while ensuring we were highly ambitious. In the end, a Board of Trustees is judged by what it achieves, not by what it suppresses. The parable of the servant who buries his master’s talents in the earth for safekeeping has relevance here (Matthew 25: 14–30).

You had to keep your wits constantly about you, chairing the museum board. As Mark Damazer explained it, there is a danger on high-powered boards of over-intervention, with everyone pushing their particular hobby horses, returning to them like dogs with bones. Half of our board were corporates, half were mavericks; the corporates prioritized process, but had a keener respect for collective responsibility and moving on after a decision is taken. And there were individuals who wanted to railroad the board, affronted if their opinion didn’t prevail, and reopening issues long after they were already decided. As the saying goes: when your horse is dead, dismount.

Fund-raising was constant. The V&A has more than thirty people engaged in it, in one guise or another, and no gallery can be renewed, no new wing erected, no curatorial post endowed, without a campaign. British cultural institutions have been dependent upon a handful of mega-donors for decades – the Sainsburys, Gettys, Sacklers and Westons – plus a network of perhaps forty secondary ones, who are serial contributors. We spent months preparing pitches to foundations and to the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has been a saviour of us all.

It requires practice and courage to ask individuals for big money. The line ‘What we are looking for is five million pounds’ has a way of getting stuck in the throat. But I learnt: no billionaire minds being asked for money, if you ask nicely. They can say no, and usually do. But it isn’t unflattering to be asked; the implication – that you can afford it – being quietly satisfying. When Sir Len Blavatnik named and funded the new Exhibition Road entrance – the Blavatnik Hall – I felt I’d earned my spurs.

We stalked new donors, tricky to identify, and trickier still to engage. Ben Elliot kick-started an International Council of younger, well-networked supporters, which brought a fresh angle to our efforts.

Tristram and I visited Hong Kong and Shanghai with Steven Murphy on a tour of philanthropists. It was like Groundhog Day, pitching to sixteen Chinese billionaires over four days, all in 100-storey office blocks. It was gold prospecting, and when a nugget hit the sieve, we were elated.

Ben Elliot made me laugh before our pitches to tycoons. Brimming with determination, he’d say, ‘For fuck’s sake, this guy is a billionaire twenty times over. I’m asking him for ten million. It’s peanuts to him. It’s like you and me giving fifty quid.’

With Jane Lawson, I visited Palm Beach and we worked our way down the length of South Ocean Boulevard, where the V&A has multiple supporters. Every Palladian-style mansion and Spanish-style hacienda is worth at least $100 million, filled to the gunnels with Caravaggios and Picassos. Our donors were very gracious, with their chilled gazpacho chowder and linen-jacketed butlers. It is a fact that elderly, rich Americans are exceptionally hospitable. Our job was to keep the museum front of mind, in the hope of triggering a donation. It’s a mating dance.

Tristram has the great advantage of being liked and organized. He carries a small notebook at all times to record ideas. We riffed forthcoming exhibitions a lot, which are a challenge for museums, being unpredictable. A major show takes three years in the planning, even four years when it involves multiple loans from galleries across the world, and from private owners needing convincing. If you own a major painting – say a Canaletto or a Matisse, hanging from chains in your Shropshire stately home or Park Avenue apartment – it’s a pain to have a big gap and empty hooks on the wall for months and months. Against that, you have the kudos of saying, ‘I’m sorry it looks so bare without the Canaletto, but we felt we had to lend it to the V&A when they asked.’

But, after so much curatorial effort, there is no guarantee which exhibitions will draw big crowds, and which won’t. The discussions reminded me of our anguished Condé Nast debates over magazine front covers – trying to predict public appetite and taste. Here are eight V&A shows, six of which were smash hits and two which did fine but nothing special.

It was the first six that were big successes in visitor numbers. But there are other considerations too – museum reputation, the balance between academic and popular shows, what’s on elsewhere. Sometimes, with exhibitions like Frida Kahlo, Dior and Pink Floyd, you know you have a sure-fire banker on your hands long before they open; but, all too often, it can go either way.

It was refreshing to spend time with a new cast of characters, and the cast at the V&A is broad. There are twenty-year-old student volunteers, elderly donors, scholars of every area of art and design, shopkeepers, guides, and a revolving cast of politicians overseeing the cultural sector, some out of passion, others as a temporary berth on the way up (or down). Old acquaintances I hadn’t seen for decades reappeared in my life, through the museum. It also gave me common cause with my uncle, Anthony Coleridge, who had been a Director of Christie’s for forty years and wrote the definitive book on Thomas Chippendale, and who visits the museum several times a month. And we revved up the annual V&A Summer Party, filling the courtyard with a thousand guests from the creative industries, fashion designers and film producers, interior designers, potters and prime ministers, young royals, old queens, ‘It girls’ and IT tech girls, plus celebrities from Kylie Minogue to Kate Moss.

The Duchess of Cambridge became Royal Patron of the museum (there hadn’t been one since Queen Victoria), having officially opened the Sainsbury Gallery, Sackler Courtyard and Blavatnik Hall a few months earlier. She had been a hit opening the new wing, smiley and unexpectedly tall in a Gucci suit; towering above us as she drew back the little curtain to reveal the plaque commemorating her visit. She was a neat fit as museum Patron, with her love of photography and the applied arts. Shortly afterwards, the Duchess opened our new suite of photography galleries, and it was a boost when Sir Elton John and David Furnish, and one of our new Shanghai supporters, the Chinese publisher Thomas Shao, as well as the Bern Schwartz family of San Francisco, came through and named galleries.

By the end of 2017, visitors to the main Victoria and Albert site in South Kensington reached a record 4 million for the first time, and our new museum partnerships were spreading the V&A message across the world. I felt intensely lucky to be involved during such a period of expansion and fun. I was reappointed for a second four-year term as V&A Chairman by Prime Minister Theresa May, at the height of the Brexit meltdown. It was surprising she found the time really, all things considered.