Forget the Arts Council - bring back the patron

Simon Raven’s novel The Rich Pay Late (1964), in which the depravity of the Eden-era establishment is laid bare as with a scalpel, contains a memorable scene in which a crooked adman named Jude Holbrook attempts to buy the proprietorship of an influential weekly magazine called Strix. His conduit is the eminently corruptible editor, Somerset Lloyd-James, allegedly based on Raven’s much more saintly school contemporary William Rees-Mogg, later custodian of The Times. But Holbrook&rsqu