It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar with Paris did I claim to be that, in 2023, I was contacted by an agency in need of someone who could conduct specialised ‘art tours’ for small groups of foreigners. Most of these clients were Americans, largely from the Midwest, but there was also a number of well-to-do Chinese and the odd Indian. They wanted much the same thing: they’d seen the Eiffel Tower and been ripped off on the Left Bank; they’d eaten at Lipp and some had even bussed out to grottier banlieues to get a real-life taste of La Haine. What they really wanted, however, was someone to hold their hand around the museums.

They paid well and bought spurious ‘VIP’ packages to the Louvre and Versailles, priced over the odds by several degrees of plausibility. At the former, they ignored Géricault’s ‘Le Radeau de la Méduse’ and Delacroix’s great history paintings, instead demanding to see the ‘Mona Lisa’ and settling for a distant, blurry selfie taken from the fringe of the room. At the last, they’d start early on the champagne, and the wives, three sheets to the wind, would strike poses and get me to take their picture by the Petit Trianon. Then it would end: they’d get bored and we’d go for lunch. I liked all of these people – and not only for the stupendous tips they left me. None of them seemed staggeringly wealthy, but the kind of money they were dropping on museum entrance fees beggared belief. I don’t know how much the institutional con of a surcharge set them back, but the Louvre in those days charged €22 for entry to its permanent collection – a collection to which, for all my insistence, nobody paid much attention.

There are three morals to this story: the first is that tourists, however uninterested they may be, won’t stint on a city’s flagship museums; the second is that competent handling of cultural tourism, as exercised by the French, is a guaranteed money-spinner; and, finally, that Britain’s cash-strapped museums could do well to learn from this. Margaret Hodge, who has led an independent review into the affairs of Arts Council England, seems to agree: the report recommended that visitors from overseas be charged a fee to visit the treasures of our national collection, and the government, inauspiciously, believes that the proposal could ‘provide significant benefits’.

Competent handling of cultural tourism, as exercised by the French, is a guaranteed money-spinner

This country takes a weird stance when it comes to museums. The current regime, under which anyone is free to visit the permanent collections of our great culture palaces, dates back to 2001, when the coffers were flush and the Blair government was seeking to turn Britain into a nation of graduates. The policy has since weathered no end of criticism, most of which posits that free museum entry is a ‘middle-class luxury’ offering no benefit to ‘working people’. This argument is as stupid as it is insulting, presupposing that anyone born working class will be too thick, too incurious, to appreciate the world-class art collection we have in this country. It’s a revolting line, but thankfully, it’s not the one we have to hand.

The proposition advanced by Hodge’s report seems, to me at least, almost entirely unobjectionable. You live in this country and pay your dues here, you reserve the right to see the ‘Arnolfini Portrait’, the ‘Seagram Murals’ or ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed’ free of charge. It’s a good deal, quite unlike anything offered anywhere else: it’s egalitarian in all the right senses and it should be preserved. Someone, however, has to pay for it, and with culture funding likely to dry up yet further, it seems only fair that the burden should fall on those who don’t already contribute to the collection’s upkeep.

The charge needn’t be steep. I’m envisioning something along the lines of the mysterious ‘tourist tax’ one is forced to pay on arrival, in cash, in various of Italy’s more attractive cities: something in the region of £7 – nothing like the Louvre’s ticket price, or the $25 New York’s Metropolitan Museum has been demanding since it dropped its ‘suggested donation’ entry policy in 2018. Most tourists, oblivious to the fact that anything so civilised as the previous policy ever existed, would happily cough up to eyeball the Rokeby Venus’s resplendent bum.

Think of what our museums could do with all that extra cash: fix their toilets, bring in loans and, hell, maybe even make some new acquisitions. These ambitions, however, assume that some level of subsidy will continue to flow from the public coffers, a condition that seems at best unlikely. The tourist charge is a popular idea – according to one survey, supported by 72 per cent of the public – just not within the culture sector itself. The loudest counter-argument so far advanced by museum world critics is that it will make our institutions look ‘unwelcoming’. But weighing heavier on their minds, I’d wager, is the very reasonable suspicion that any such move will be a smokescreen for deep funding cuts.

It’s a justifiable fear: the Department for Culture, Media and Sport could well cite the extra revenue stream as justification for turning off the taps. This, however, is purely speculative. What isn’t is the question of implementation: the scheme would demand a digital ID system, probably requiring the domestic user to upload proof of identity and address. This would be prohibitively expensive to develop and would doubtless be handed over to a private-sector contractor: just remember how well IT-related PPPs have worked out in the past here; and imagine all the fun the hackers would have with it.

But things have changed since 2001, and the counter-arguments no longer hold the balance. There’s little money to go around and what’s left is unlikely to be directed towards the arts: somewhere, something has to give. The fact is that our museums are a major draw for tourists. They come to this country to see ‘The Hay Wain’, ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’, possibly even, though I know not why, ‘Monarch of the Glen’. Making them pay will not put them off. You need only look at the Met’s consistently high visitor figures to see this.

If the government really is serious about charging non-residents, I venture a word of advice: suffer the expense of a new ticketing system, and don’t award the contract to friends or cronies. Things will go wrong, embarrassingly and publicly – when is that not the case? – but that doesn’t make the proposition any less sound. I’ll admit that a two-tier system doesn’t seem attractive on a utopian level, but that isn’t a plane of luxury we can afford to support any more; and this is the least-worst means of maintaining an egalitarian policy on our own terms. And should tourists steer clear, so much the better for us: we’d at least be rid of the selfie sticks, guided tours and general overcrowding that plague our most popular galleries. All this considered and qualified, I pose a genuine question: what, ultimately, is not to like?