I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic and supremely competent – in theory, the perfect candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Tate leadership. She got the job two years later, but the confrontational demeanour that had worked so well up north didn’t wash in London, where the phrase ‘can do’ routinely elicits the same retort: no, you can’t.

Meanwhile, a series of PR cock-ups – largely related to the museum group’s paralysis in the face of political correctness – slammed any sense that Tate was in control of its messaging. And while it wasn’t necessarily Balshaw’s fault that visitor figures plummeted in the wake of the pandemic, the captain is still supposed to go down with the ship. Balshaw eventually did just that, announcing her resignation from the Tate just before Christmas.

In fairness, she’d had Turbine Hall-sized shoes to fill: her predecessor, Nick Serota, had sculpted the job in his........

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