Hunt is on

So it is to be Jeremy Hunt after all, one of those rare occasions when a junior shadow cabinet member is given the actual portfolio w hen the party gets into government – some thought it would go to the Lib Dems’ Don Foster. The same happened in ’97 when Chris Smith got the culture job after being the shadow. He lasted for the whole of the first Blair administration before being dumped, but is reckoned by Labour and Conservative alike to have been the most effective in the job for the arts to date. Hunt’s first utterance as culture secretary, though, was to warn that £70m has to be chopped from the DCMS budget – hence, presumably, quick-off-the-mark welcomes from the likes of Colin Tweedy of A&B which must be line for the recycling bin in the Tory trashing of quangos (in his fulsome salutation Tweedy ever so ‘umbly points out that A&B have produced their own policy document with ‘recommendations for how best to reboot and rewire the mixed economy’. What’s not certain is if that £70m is on top of the £60m DCMS promised to cut after the March Budget. But no confirmation yet that Ed Vaizey has the number two job, arts minister, which he had been shadowing since 2006. If he gets it he should take care not to let history repeat itself: Mark Fisher had been the shadow who got the government job under Smith in 1997, but in a couple of months was jettisoned never to darken governmental doors again.