This is a rather poor show from the Arts Council

The arts funding body promises accountability but delivers ambiguity

There are some well-known phrases and sayings guaranteed to send readers into a stupor. "Hollywood star set for West End debut" is, of course, one. But the most sleep-inducing phrase tends to be the two words Arts Council. Since the bureaucracy and inertia of the arts' funding body seem so far removed from the vibrancy of the bodies they fund, I and my colleagues on other papers tend to give it little attention.

The Arts Council has become suspiciously happy to reciprocate this lack of engagement, and nearly two years ago ceased holding the regular press conferences intended to explain its policies, give its opinions on the arts scene and show the accountability that the Government has urged it to show.

Happily, a journalist at The Stage has continued to engage, and he managed to read through the council's annual report, a devotion to duty that the vast majority of arts practitioners will not have shown. In the report he unearthed one fascinating fact. It was that the Arts Council spent almost £1.3m on consultants in the first year of its allegedly money-saving restructuring process. Another fascinating fact emerged in the report of London Arts, which comes under the Arts Council's aegis. It states that the former London Arts chief executive Sue Robertson received £64,286 redundancy plus £15,871 in lieu of notice. At the time it was announced that Ms Robertson, who publicly opposed the Arts Council's restructuring plans, had resigned from her post and was not made redundant.

I call that being extremely economical with the truth, though Arts Council sources tell me they admit only that there was some "ambiguity". I don't expect the national body representing the arts to be happy with ambiguity, any more than I expect it to spend £1.3m on consultants, when many if not all of the bodies it funds are crying out for more money to do creative work.

What I do expect is for the Arts Council to prevent crises at the national companies that it funds and monitors. Why has it allowed the English National Opera and Royal Shakespeare Company to drift into trouble? Why did Nicholas Payne resign as head of the English National Opera a few months ago? Can we assume that as he resigned he received no Sue Robertson-style pay-off? I rather think he did. How much was this publicly funded pay-off? These are publicly accountable organisations funded and scrutinised by the publicly accountable Arts Council.

The chairman of the Labour Party affiliated arts group, Arts for Labour, is now calling for the Audit Commission to check that the savings promised in the Arts Council restructuring can be delivered. And the director of the National Campaign for the Arts is asking how long the arts world will have to wait before seeing the £8m that was promised from the restructuring. I would also ask how long we have to wait before the Arts Council and its chief clients are properly accountable. If the Arts Council is unable to give the answers itself, perhaps it could ask some of its highly paid consultants to help.

*Mark Rylance, the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, gave a memorable performance at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last Monday, castigating his hosts in his acceptance speech for "promoting the arms trade" in an Evening Standard supplement on the Territorial Army out that day. But I learn from sources close to the Globe that this was not the only bad blood between Rylance and the newspaper. I gather that Rylance, as well as receiving the Special Award for the Globe, was also himself originally on the shortlist for best actor. He complained, though, that he did not believe in prizes and was "outraged" to be on the best actor shortlist. So he was removed from it. He was happy to accept the Special Award as it honoured the Globe, rather than just him as an actor.

¿ One moment at the awards luncheon that stood out for me came during the speech Stephen Daldry made when giving the best director award to Sam Mendes. Daldry said that Mendes' current production of Twelfth Night was "the definitive Twelfth Night". Stephen receives the 2002 award for tact and diplomacy. On the same shortlist and in the same room was Tim Carroll, nominated for his production of ... Twelfth Night.

¿ Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play, was 50 last week. At a special performance attended by the Queen, Lord Attenborough, who was in the original production, came on stage to deliver the nightly entreaty to the audience not to reveal whodunnit. Also in the audience was Toby Young, theatre critic of The Spectator. Mr Young disliked the play so much that he made a point in his review in The Spectator this week of revealing precisely whodunnit to discourage people from going to see it. I had to consider for a few moments whether this was just another of that magazine's brigade of ageing young fogeys being playfully silly while liking to think himself iconoclastic, or a rather more serious abuse of a theatre critic's position. I tended towards the latter, because I detest anyone giving away the plot of anything, however much they might loathe the piece.

Some things should remain unspoken. I, for example, have never told anyone that I am a recipient of regular emails from Mr Toby Young informing me of what he is doing, what he hopes to do next, and what opinions he has. I have not asked to receive these emails and, indeed, have never met Mr Young. I imagine many other people are on his email list. This suggests to me that Mr Young is a ghastly self-publicist, egotistical, insecure and rather tedious. But please, audience, don't tell anyone.

d.lister@independent.co.uk