The best things in life are free….

While the implementation of the McMaster report - which he called “a serious attempt to change the culture of the Arts Council and the way it goes about its work, and a degree of recognition on the government’s side that we need to move from a measurement culture to a culture of judgement” - is a major part of his policy platform, he reiterated its emphasis on “breaking down the barriers and perceptions that [the arts] are obviously not for them.”

Burnham, who early on in his pre-parliamentary days worked as an adviser to Chris Smith during his tenure in charge of the department (and which he called “without doubt the best possible apprenticeship that anybody could ever possibly have for a job that they would be doing”), went on to declare: “The time is right to do something within the performing arts that Chris did for the museums and the visual arts, to take an iconic step whereby you send a message that theatre particularly is for everybody.”

McMaster’s original proposal was that all publicly-funded organisations should hold a free week every year, when tickets would be free to all. “We really exhaustively discussed with the Arts Council the best way of doing this,” declared Burnham, and he said, “If the objective is to build a new audience over a long period of time, we could not be looking at a gimmick measure that was here today and gone tomorrow, but we had to think really carefully about where the best place to put that money was to achieve our objective. A free week would be good, but it would here and gone before the people we were aiming at woke up to it. I focused in the end on theatre and young people, because I felt that would be the best use of the limited resourced we have. I think that all of us, and I include myself, need to remember just how affecting theatre can be for young people. It can be life changing in your late teens and early 20s.”

And he got personal: “It was for me - I went to the theatre a lot in that era, and I never forget going to see Glenda Jackson in The House of Bernarda Alba at the Lyric Hammersmith - you can’t forget how powerful an experience it can be.” Indeed, while Burnham had earlier declared that his Cambridge English Tripos “killed my joy of reading, but it didn’t kill my joy of theatre, which has been a lifelong love” - he hoped that this would instil the same experience in others.

His officials are now working on the details of the implementation of the scheme, but he revealed that theatres are now being invited to join it and it will be launched next February. It will take place on what he called “the quieter nights of the week” - the scheme was initially dubbed “Happy Mondays”, he said, crediting his adviser Ruth Mackenzie (who was with him yesterday, quietly gnawing on her nails beside him for the most part) for the phrase, partly because they were at party conference in Manchester at the time. He hoped “that over the next two years, depending on the extent to which theatres choose to join the scheme, we will have a figure of some 1million free tickets over that period.”

The plan is that the seats given away would, for the most part, have been otherwise empty; and he hoped that it would contribute to a particular buzz in the air that night that would be welcomed by the casts. “I don’t want it to be a gimmick, but a permanent thing that develops and grows.”

It was one of the few areas in which he could be specific about what changes his department are making. The rest of the time the discussion was largely a matter of aspirations rather than implementation; not least, of course, on the Olympics, though he assured the gathering that, after a meeting at the Treasury the day before, “there is the general agreement of everybody that £9.3b is the budget, and there will be no further take from the National Lottery”. So the fear that further cash will be diverted there, and away from the arts, can be put to one side for now. But how much money is being put towards the artistic contribution to the Olympics themselves?

When I duly asked him about the Cultural Olympiad, he replied that budgets are still being built for “ten iconic projects of national significance” that are being planned, but that over £50m has been committed - the funding for which includes the opening and closing ceremonies. After I replied that there wouldn’t necessarily be much that was going to be left over, Ian Shuttleworth, my FT colleague and secretary of the Drama Section, quickly proved that he’s not on the FT for nothing and said, “If my arithmetic is correct, £50m amounts to little more than half of one percent of the Olympic budget.”

Burnham - himself a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury - replied, “That’s very good arithmetic - but I wouldn’t be too cynical about it. The Cultural Olympiad will work. And it’s not all about money, actually. It’s about the quality and ambition of the ideas that come forward; our Olympics should be all about atmosphere and spontaneity in the sense of creating a national celebration. That is the test, and will define whether it is a success or not.”

And it all links he said, in the end, to “other things that we’ve got under way, like free theatre tickets to the under 26s. All these things coming together are a general celebration of sport and art in this era, and I have the highest ambitions for it. You can hold me to account for it.”

As Charles Spencer, soon to be the new President of the Critics’ Circle, immediately rejoined, “Just think of the bus and think of the Dome, and do it differently from those two.” Charlie also asked that Burnham look at the West End again differently - and a scheme about which Charlie said, “Tessa Jowell had come very close to agreeing, before we had the misfortune to win the Olympics, of doing a deal with the theatre owners about restoring the fabric of the West End theatres.” Burnham replied that he agreed that the West End “is absolutely crucial to the London visitor economy” and pointed out that he “could see with my own eyes the issue that needs addressing”; and promised to return to the department to find out how far the discussions had reached. But he also pointed out, “I run a department that is not just about London, and I am reported to be tough on London-centricity and the causes of it. I think there is a whole world of culture outside of London.”