Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture.

In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of inclusivity and diversity and step gingerly over the eggshells of elitism, racism, gender politics and decolonisation. Its hands are further tied by the requirement to operate as extensions of the social services. The diktats of Levelling Up have to be honoured. The disabled and the disadvantaged, the young and the old are all crying out to be championed. The arts must work in schools, hospitals and prisons as well as theatres and art galleries. The right sneers and calls for abolition. Leftist agitators ask who gets to define what ‘excellence’ consists of? And should munificence be directed towards posh metropolitans wallowing in grand opera or deprived kids off their heads on drill?

No wonder ACE struggles to fulfil the simple and benign core mission set out by Maynard Keynes in 1946 – to give financial support to the higher reaches of professional artistic activity and to ensure that it is accessible at reasonable cost across the population.

Having been flayed by the media in the past, ACE has become more cautious and even biddable in recent years, but with chairman Sir Nicholas Serota’s admirably circumspect hand on the tiller, it has managed to preserve what shreds of its independence remain. No disasters, no exposés in the Daily Mail, just a lot of moaning. But after a long period of austerity, ACE has been left chronically short of the money it needs for the tasks it has been set. So I now propose that it stiffens its sinews and saves a few million by withdrawing all life-support subvention from two of its major clients, thereby effectively killing them off in their present form. This would allow them a rebirth – a radical rethink of their function and structure. Will this happen? No. But when the Levelling Up agenda starts calling for a transfer of funds from London to the regions, ACE’s officers might grudgingly acknowledge the justice of my case.

The two institutions in question are English National Opera and English National Ballet. They currently receive, respectively, just over £12 million and £6 million from the taxpayer per annum. Both companies are constituted as tax-exempt charities. They seem to be efficiently managed and nobody is making inordinate amounts of money out of them. Their longer-term financial positions are impossible to read at present because of pandemic-related low levels of commercial activity and one-off recovery grants.

Let’s start with ENO, which has struggled at times to remain a going concern. Its right to call itself ‘National’ is purely historic, because it hasn’t performed outside London for decades. It is crucially lumbered with ownership of the Coliseum – an enormous Edwardian West End variety theatre with a wide stage acoustically unsuited to opera, offering no office, rehearsal or storage space and few opportunities for catering. Infested with vermin and with atrocious backstage conditions, the place is a weight around ENO’s neck: hard to staff, expensive to run and almost impossible to fill to capacity.

Every time, over the years, I have asked about the possibility of selling or leasing the Coliseum, I have been given a different answer, so I am left believing that the board doesn’t really know what the legal position is – half the problem being an absence of alternatives.

Meanwhile, over the past two decades ENO’s productivity has steadily declined. The season about to start will present around 80 full-scale performances, half what was regularly offered around the turn of the millennium, and appreciably fewer than in 2018. The remaining weeks are now filled with imported musicals (this summer it was My Fair Lady) or one-night events, sometimes employing members of ENO’s fine resident chorus and orchestra, often not.

The company has enjoyed much success in certain areas – notably the operas of Philip Glass and Gilbert and Sullivan – but core audiences have generally been alienated by eccentric productions in stilted translations (surtitles having radically changed the argument for singing in English) and high ticket prices. Nobody is prepared to discuss the level of paid attendance in detail, but informed rumour and anecdotal evidence suggests that on occasion it has sunk as low as 30 per cent. A scheme to offer free tickets to anybody under 21 appears to have flopped – even teenagers recognise that anything good ought to cost them a bit. This is one of several last-ditch initiatives dreamed up by ENO’s bullish CEO Stuart Murphy, former head honcho at BBC3 and Sky Entertainment, who has also sanctioned some horrid alterations to the Coliseum’s foyer that outrage loyal old-timers. Murphy is trying his damnedest, poor guy, but one feels that his ship is so porous that it had better be left to sink.

English National Ballet has something ENO badly lacks – a magnificent new home in Canning Town, where it can administrate itself, rehearse and offer public classes and events. Over the past decade ENB has also benefitted from the strong artistic directorship of the steely Tamara Rojo, whose sword should not lightly be crossed. She has done a first-rate job – albeit at the cost of blood and tears and employment tribunals – of improving the company’s overall standard of dancing and bringing outstanding modern choreography by William Forsythe, Pina Bausch and Akram Khan into ENB’s London repertory. That she has failed to groom any new British-trained stars isn’t her fault – there’s a worldwide dearth, especially of front-rank ballerinas.

But note that word ‘London’: it is at the root of ENB’s problem, compounded by the implications of that adjective ‘National’. Beyond the M25, the company’s viability has narrowed down to Swan Lake, and its occasional efforts (with Manon and Le Corsaire, for instance) to broaden the repertory outside the capital have met with disastrously empty houses. Meanwhile, there are eastern European companies of decent quality that could tour perfectly adequate productions of Swan Lakeon a purely commercial basis requiring no subvention from the taxpayer and short-changing nobody.

ACE is not constituted to sponsor the pabulum of popular entertainment. It may sound faintly pompous – and in today’s demotic cultural atmosphere few would dare proclaim it – but Keynes’s Reithian rationale for state subsidy remains its justification: ACE has an aim to educate and elevate the nation’s artistic taste. If ENB can’t take the more adventurous programming that it presents to the converted at Sadler’s Wells out to the regions, then at some level it is failing to do the job.

Size is what hampers both companies – the 2,359 seats of ENO’s Coliseum and the similarly cavernous old theatres in Manchester, Bristol and Southampton that ENB regularly visits. Without the imperative of filling so many seats, the work could get much more interesting, and this is why I would like to see both companies shut down and reinvented.

The new model for both would be smaller in scale and lighter on its feet. Fewer backroom staff, no more fairy-tale tutus or routine Puccini, much tighter design budgets, more flexible units of corps de ballet, chorus and orchestra, new stories to tell and new music to be heard, but less pressure to sell large numbers of ticket; more imagination of the sort shown by Opera North, and an ACE grant seen as an invitation to take moderate risks rather than a handout to help balance the books. Measures such as these would break cracked moulds and unlock fresh energies – and could perhaps save a couple of million quid too.

Meanwhile prospects for both companies in their first full post-pandemic seasons about to open look flat. I hope I am proved wrong, but I can’t see two new American operas (It’s a Wonderful Life and Blue) doing a decent level of business at the Coliseum, and even selling more than 15,000 tickets at £150 (top price) for a new production of Tosca without stars won’t be easy. ENB kicks off with, guess what, Swan Lake in Liverpool and Manchester: it is disturbing to note that while Rojo leaves in November to take up a new artistic directorship post in San Francisco, her replacement Aaron S. Watkin – a Canadian, currently in Dresden, a promising appointment in terms of his solid track record – won’t be on site until August next year. The fate of both companies remains in ACE’s hands: will it stand back or step forward?