Now let Mrs Blair chair a seminar on the future of the RSC

Mr Blair talks at length about rock, but it's hard to recall him expressing any passion for theatre

It's not often that the arts are ahead of other government portfolios in creating constitutional controversy; but the row this week over Cherie Blair chairing a seminar on transport will have brought back memories for some in the arts. Mrs Blair actually chaired a lecture on the arts at Downing Street two years ago, and I was one of those present. The lecture was given by Derrick Anderson, the chief executive of Wolverhampton Council. In fact, the Prime Minister was in the chair at the start of the evening and handed over to his wife when he had to leave.

The constitutional oddity of that handover was that Chris Smith, the then Secretary of State for Culture, was sitting in the front row; and it was against all precedent for the PM to ask his wife rather than the relevant Secretary of State to take over. I also learnt later that Mr Smith had no say in choosing who was to give the lecture or the subject.

Cherie Blair told members of the gathering, which was replete with such figures as Trevor Nunn, Salman Rushdie, Sir Richard Eyre and Sir Nicholas Serota, that if they had any further points of arts policy that they wished to raise, they should write to her and "we" would then take these points on board. Mr Smith must have felt fully redundant that evening.

That was then; this is now. So it's fair to ask two years later what progress has been made on the ideas that were discussed at that unique Downing Street gaze on the nation's culture.

The thrust of Mr Anderson's message to the Prime Minister and the nation's arts leaders was that there should be a new National Creativity Commission to decide best how to change the arts funding system and bring us into "the new techno-cultural era".

Forget the jargon; the breathtaking fact was that the best a Millennium Lecture held in the presence of the Prime Minister could call for was the setting up of yet another commission. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't happened. The other key measure proposed – a reconstructed network of regional arts boards – couldn't have been more unfortunately timed. Since then, far from giving the regions more power, the Arts Council has taken over some of the regional arts boards' powers.

No policy ideas seem to have been sent to Mrs Blair. Certainly, none has been acted upon. And, to the consternation of many in the arts, the Prime Minister still disappoints their hopes that he might be an outspoken advocate for the arts. Those who run the country's main theatres say privately that the Blair family are keen theatre-goers. But, while Mr Blair will talk at length about rock music and presented a recent award to Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis, the makers of the Bridget Jones movie, it is hard to recall him expressing at home or abroad his passion for British theatre. He could start by calling a Downing Street seminar on the future of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its Stratford-upon-Avon base. Mrs Blair could even chair it.

* Simon Wilson, who has had the wonderfully postmodern title of Curator of Interpretation at the Tate, is retiring and will never again enlighten us on the hidden meanings of the Turner prize entries. Mr Wilson has given endless encouragement to champions of conceptualist art over the years (and endless grins to its detractors) with his generously apocalyptic interpretations. Last year's winning entry, Martin Creed's flickering light bulb in an empty gallery, was a case in point. My own guess that it was a graphic symbol of the underfunding of museums and galleries was far too literal. The inimitable Wilson interpreted it thus: "I think life is like that work. One minute it's on, the next minute it's off. It's emblematic of mortality. What Creed has done is really make minimal art minimal by dematerialising it – removing it from the hectic, commercialised world of capitalist culture."

They don't tell 'em like that any more. Wilson's successor has a lot to live up to. And in case he or she doesn't know what the job involves, Wilson has articulated it. "At last," he told me, "it's someone else's turn to explain to Jeremy Paxman the profound significance of Tracey Emin's knickers."

*I HAVE A quibble about the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles "best single of all time" poll, the result of which was announced on Wednesday. No problem with Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" being top. What struck me was at No 9: "Yesterday" by the Beatles. The Beatles never actually released "Yesterday" as a single in Britain in the time they were together.

Hard as it might be to credit now, but back then great album tracks were not necessarily released as singles; and great singles were not put on albums. The Beatles, for example, never put "Hey Jude" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" on an album at the time. The Guinness people can claim accuracy as Yesterday was released as a single in 1976 as part of a compilation pack. But that was six years after the group had broken up, so I think it's a bit dodgy.

d.lister@independent.co.uk