High drama in Hampstead

There is a little-known dialect which is spoken by arts bureaucrats and politicians when they don't want the folks at home to know what is really going on. It is called artspeak and, like Esperanto, it is espoused by a self-selecting group of people whose sense of superiority, already inflated, is additionally swelled by their display of fluency in this esoteric, unattractive tongue.

Here is how it works. The first minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell, announced to the nation on St Andrew's Day that "the next major enterprise for our society" would be "arts for all" as a universal democratic right. Amid roars of joy from cultural leaders who have suffered savage reversals in the six years since devolution, McConnell went on to pledge, sotto voce, that there would be no extra money for the arts and quite possibly a good deal less.

That is artspeak in action. What you think you have just heard is never going to be what you are going to get.

The incoming chairman of Arts Council England, Sir Christopher Frayling, is a native artspeaker. Frayling, a tireless committee timeserver, was ushered in last week as a new-broom successor to Gerry Robinson, who, over five years, has successfully alienated almost the entire creative community. (Corporate raider Robinson is now advertising for struggling businesses to participate in his next how-to BBC2 series; if you are an entrepreneur who longs to be patronised to death in prime time, do give him a call.)

Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Arts, was supposed to be a harbinger of change, a breach with the recent past. So, what were his opening words? "I am truly delighted... to follow Gerry Robinson's very successful chairmanship," he burbled. "Gerry will leave a council in excellent shape." Translated from artspeak, that can mean either "I am not going to make a jot of difference" or "I don't believe a word I'm saying".

In artspeak, illusion is all and confusion a desirable outcome. Robinson and his chief executive, Peter Hewitt, have used the dialect expertly to praise efficiency and excellence while squandering millions on needless projects and "recovery programmes" for institutional failures.

Artspeak allows apparatchiks to evade responsibility for their sins. Having encouraged the Royal Shakespeare Company to quit London and knock down its theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the ACE stood smugly by while the RSC shed its artistic and executive directors and finally its chairman, without any ACE person having to walk the plank.

ACE pressure on the board of English National Opera forced the resignation of its director, the internationally respected Nicholas Payne, an intervention that has been beautifully fudged in artspeak.

When such executions occur, there is never any proof - no signed memo, no minuted meeting. The blade falls behind closed boardroom doors, usually under threat of financial foreclosure. A bloodstained axe has, however, just been found in a lay-by off the Finchley Road.

Hampstead Theatre, once Britain's best incubator of new drama, reopened last January in a new £15.7 million building, of which £10 million was funded by a Lottery grant.