WHERE, in the midst of a cost of living crisis, sit the arts? It’s a question that every philistine (and every Tory government minister engaged in their phoney “culture war”) knows how to answer.

The arts in times such as these (indeed in any times) are, they say, an expensive luxury. The only people who would dare to argue that spending on the arts should be a priority are the so-called “chattering classes”. When, earlier this year, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner dared to attend an opera at Glyndebourne, then deputy prime minister Dominic Raab sneered, with undisguised snobbery, that she was a “champagne socialist”.

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