By Rachel Sylvester, published 18th July 2015
Jesse Norman plays the trumpet in the parliamentary jazz band and has just started learning the tenor sax — music is “calisthenics for the soul”, he says. His hero is Louis Armstrong and he describes Bob Dylan as a “god”.
The new chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee loves the theatre, writes books and adores football so he is well qualified for the job. With a mother who was a painter and a father who founded the Roundhouse Trust, he has the arts in his blood. “I really care about this stuff,” he says. “I certainly don’t think the arts and culture are a luxury at all — they are not a luxury in our lives, one of the most intimate things you can do with someone is to ask them what music they listen to and look at their iPod. Look at the joy someone gets from going to a football game.”
Although his committee’s remit covers museums and galleries, as well as sport and ballet, the priority will be the BBC, after the government published its green paper on the future of the corporation this week. Mr Norman admits that he has little time for television but when he does catch up with programmes on iPlayer he is as likely to watch Strictly Come Dancing as Wolf Hall. He listens to a lot of radio and is a fan of “ancient comedy like Hancock’s Half Hour”.
He describes himself as “in general a supporter of the BBC” but he does believe that there are questions to be resolved. “We will be . . . probing but from the perspective of a broad admiration and understanding of what the BBC has done and what it stands for and the place it holds in the nation’s hearts.” Having worked as an adviser to George Osborne and Boris Johnson before becoming an MP in 2010, he insists that the Conservatives have not got it in for the broadcaster. “Passions run so high on both sides . . . but I don’t think there’s any evidence that the government has a particular axe to grind.”
Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the director-general of the BBC, has suggested that the licence fee “had another ten years in it”, he points out. The culture committee has in the past called for the introduction of a household levy, paid by every home regardless of whether it had a television. It is an “interesting idea” that would guarantee an income, Mr Norman says. “What I don’t think you can do is to pretend that other approaches such as a subscription model are an automatic substitute for the licence fee.”
The way in which people consume the media has changed beyond recognition, he argues. “People remember the FA Cup final and Morecambe and Wise as key events or shows. We now live in a completely different television world.” That doesn’t mean the BBC shouldn’t try to have national appeal. “It won’t hold the affection and the universal appeal the BBC aspires to if it didn’t have at least some things that everybody felt they wanted to watch and attracted very large audiences.” But he insists there must be a balance. “I like watching a good football match as much as the next man and I might easily watch The Voice. The point is that the original Reithian remit was ‘inform, educate and entertain’. Entertain is one portion of that, the question is: is enough being done on the inform and educate?”
He is concerned about the overweening bureaucracy at the corporation. “I think the average man or woman on the Clapham omnibus would look at any organisation which had ten management layers — that the head was seeking to reduce to seven management layers — and say ‘Well hold on a second, maybe there’s an issue about management’. The reason why W1A was such a success was because so many people regarded it in parts as a documentary about the way in which the BBC runs itself.”
Pay is another worry. “If you are in Herefordshire, in my constituency, where the average income is £25,000 for a two-parent family, and you look at the numbers you see being paid at Broadcasting House even to relatively junior executives, folks just scratch their heads and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ ”
After a report this week suggested that the wage bill for presenters earning more than £1 million went up by 21 per cent last year, Mr Norman thinks the BBC should look again at how it recruits and pays its stars.
Ordinary voters “would look at some of these salaries and say . . . the BBC is giving these people an unmatchable opportunity to promote their own brands across the nation on multi-platform media and maybe we shouldn’t also be paying them quite as much as we are to do that”.
In Mr Norman’s view, the corporation should focus more on creating new household names. “The argument is always made that we have to pay to keep top talent, but in the BBC’s case that argument is arguably less strong because they should be incubating it as well. You have to ask a question as to why salaries would necessarily be going up given the stringency of the spending regime the BBC is under.”
It’s not only the corporation that should be nurturing talent. The football authorities in this country also need to do more to find the stars of the future, Mr Norman says. He condemns the “skulduggery of different kinds” at the world governing body, FIFA, but his more immediate concern is closer to home. “The Premier League could do a heck of a lot more to fund grassroots football. If you look at the number of home-grown young players in the Premier League it is falling and it’s only about 30 per cent now. One reason why the England football team has not won a major football championship for 49 years is because not enough young talent is getting into the Premier League.”
Although he doesn’t want quotas for British players, he thinks there needs to be a change of attitude. “Germany has a very successful national team and one of the many ways in which German football is different from English football is that historically they have had a much higher percentage of German players making it through. They have a completely different approach, it’s much more community oriented.”
He also worries about the huge salaries paid to young footballing stars. “These numbers seem absolutely stratospheric to ordinary human beings. It’s not unusual for people to have their heads turned by too much money. One question is how do you protect young people who are coming into the game?”
A former member of David Cameron’s policy advisory board, Mr Norman has been described as the prime minister’s philosopher king and the godfather of Tory modernisation. Having written a book called Compassionate Conservatism, he is pleased by the government’s renewed commitment to a One Nation approach with policies such as the national living wage.
There is though, in his view, “more to be done” on executive pay. “How is it possible that for a decade after 2003 the pay of the bottom third of the workforce stagnated in real terms while the pay of chief executives went up by several hundred per cent?” he says. There has been a “culture of complacency” in too many businesses which has led to what he calls “crony capitalism”. “The link between corporate behaviour and the public good has just been lost.”
This isn’t just about the City. He worries that a super-rich elite is floating off from the rest of society. “It’s important for the wagon train to be coherent, you don’t want some people disappearing off and others being left behind.”
Another of his books is The Big Society, and he is convinced that social cohesion must be an essential Tory goal. “For me Conservatism is about the preservation of social value. That is pre-eminently the freedom to live your life as you choose, subject to the constraints of an ordered society. The Conservatives can never be friends of injustice.”
Culture, he argues, is not just about entertainment but liberation. “My hero is Louis Armstrong. He grew up in Storyville, he was the son of a prostitute and he discharged a gun on one occasion and was sent to what was called ‘a home for coloured waifs’, where he joined the band and learnt to play the cornet. It’s an incredible story. Music is a way out.”
There is, he believes, a “social power” to music “to bring people together, to give discipline and focus to someone’s life, to initiate them into a history and tradition. It’s very good for prisoners, people with disabilities, children who struggle to express themselves.”
For him it is also a manifestation of a political philosophy. “Take some of the most apparently wild improvisational music — African drumming rituals, jazz, hip hop, they are all subject to rules. It’s only when you know the rules that you can transcend them and remake them and the scope for genius comes out, but you can’t start unless you understand something about where you come from and what the rules are. That’s deeply conservative. You are embedding yourself in tradition.”
Alexander Jesse Norman
Curriculum vitae
Born June 23, 1962
Educated Eton College; Oxford
Career Ran an educational charity in eastern Europe before joining Barclays. Left in 1997 to teach philosophy at University College London. Having advised George Osborne and Boris Johnson, he was elected MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire in 2010. Chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee. Has been a director of Roundhouse arts centre and the Hay Festival
Family Married to Kate, with three children
Quick fire
Wolf Hall or Poldark? Wolf Hall
Louis Armstrong or Florence and the Machine? Louis Armstrong
W1A or Yes Minister? Both
Twitter or telephone? Telephone
Bob Dylan or John Keats? Bob Dylan. I love Keats but Dylan is a god
Jeremy Clarkson or Jeremy Paxman? Both
The Girl on a Train or Go Set a Watchman? I won’t read either over the summer I’m afraid. I’m going to read All That Is by James Salter
Rembrandt or Tracy Emin? Rembrandt