When the chair of the National Maritime Museum, Charles Dunstone, wrote to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to extend Dr Aminul Hoque’s trusteeship into a second four-year term, it was just a formality. The letter, written in the summer of 2020, said Hoque was a valued board member. It did not say that he was the sole non-white trustee. It did not mention his academic position, or his BBC history documentary, or his MBE. There was absolutely no need to say any of that. No one had ever heard of a trusteeship not being extended: it was automatic. An official at the department, however, telephoned Dunstone to say that Hoque’s term would not be renewed. There was no requirement for the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, to justify the decision, they said – however, they pointed out, Hoque had “liked” tweets hostile to the government. That autumn, Dunstone urged Dowden by phone to change his mind. He would not be able to defend the minister’s decision to the museum and fellow trustees. In January, though, Dunstone heard again from the DCMS: Hoque’s trusteeship would definitely not be renewed. Dunstone, honourably, resigned. For a giddy moment the other trustees, so I was told, considered going en masse – their “I’m Spartacus!” moment – until they realised that doing so would offer the government the chance to stuff the board with its chosen people. Bear in mind that Dunstone, the billionaire founder of TalkTalk, and his colleagues – among them a retired first sea lord and the then head of Lloyd’s Register – were as far from “woke warriors” as can be imagined. For his part, “I was shocked, disappointed and baffled,” Hoque told me. “People should draw their own conclusions as to whether my previous academic research and writing contributed to the government’s actions.” (A DCMS spokesperson told me: “There is no automatic presumption of reappointment, and ministers may decide to make a reappointment or launch a campaign to attract fresh talent.”) I’ve had my own little trawl through Hoque’s tweets. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for the England football team. There’s also a bit about British history, which, he suggested, “needs to be rewritten to include the stories of its ethnic minorities and acknowledge their important contribution to the development of the British national story. #decolonize #inclusive #multiplestories.” Pretty mild stuff – but the sort of thing that’s a red flag to this “culture wars”-obsessed government. Appointing political allies to influential public positions is nothing new. Under Thatcher, the Conservative Marmaduke Hussey became BBC chair; under New Labour it was Gavyn Davies, who had once worked for Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. “What is different now,” said Peter Riddell recently, “is the breadth of the campaign and the close engagement of 10 Downing Street.” Until September Riddell was commissioner for public appointments, in charge of ensuring the system’s fairness. The government, in short, is going in hard to shape English public bodies in its image. This project is being pushed forward shamelessly – as in the case of Ofcom, where the process to appoint a chair is being rerun so that the favoured, but initially rejected, former Mail editor Paul Dacre can have another crack. In the arena of the arts, what is seen as a left-of-centre consensus born of the Blair and Brown years has been targeted for fixing. The arts have become a battleground where ideas of national image, heritage and history are fought over. At the heart of No 10, there’s an intense dislike of the politics of identity, and a loathing of the suggestion that the British imperial project was harmful. That’s partly born of the assumption that anything that even hints at a lack of patriotism is a turn-off to the voters of the “red wall”. A look at the board of the National Portrait Gallery in London gives a sense of how this might be going: the museum in charge of presenting England’s image back to itself, and currently in the throes of a major redisplay, has on its board Chris Grayling; Jacob Rees-Mogg (the leader of the House of Commons is an automatic appointment); and Inaya Folarin Iman, the culture and social affairs editor of the rightwing GB News. The chair is David Ross, who “facilitated” Boris and Carrie Johnson’s infamous Mustique holiday. Behind this campaign of realignment is Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s culture adviser when he was mayor of London, now head of No 10’s policy unit, and her husband, Tory fixer Dougie Smith. The trawling of tweets is not just about risk-assessing inflammatory or offensive things buried deep in a person’s feed, but fishing for disloyalty. One person who recently sat as an independent member of an interview panel told me that their attention was drawn to one candidate’s tweet that was unfavourable about Brexit. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” they told me they replied. The government, it is pretty clear, doesn’t have a great deal of time for rules, or established practice, or the unspoken liberal norms that have traditionally funnelled behaviour into commonly accepted channels. Kicking out Hoque wasn’t the done thing, but since it was possible, it did it. You’re not supposed to leak the names of favoured candidates before a public appointments process begins, but it did with Dacre for Ofcom. The process itself is designed to be transparent and rigorous: it involves an interview panel containing at least one independent member and chaired by a civil servant. The panel will name who it considers the best candidate, alongside one or two others deemed “appointable”. Riddell has voiced concerns about ministers ignoring recommendations and selecting candidates deemed “unappointable”; there has already been an attempt to do this, he said recently. Johnson has form; when he was mayor, he tried to insist that the former Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley became chair of the Arts Council London, despite the interview panel having rejected her. (Blocked at the time by Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw, she later got the job under the then Tory culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.) How much does all this matter? Boards of trustees are innately conservative: that institutional stolidity might act as some protection from the radicalism of the right as much as it frustrates those on the left who wish for change. The direct influence of No 10 on arts institutions does not extend deep into the arts (and not much beyond England’s borders): aside from national museums, Arts Council England and a handful of others, English arts organisations are in charge of appointing their own board members. However – and unarguably once the BBC is brought into the equation – those that do fall under direct government influence happen to be especially influential ones. The most important job of trustees is to select directors of organisations, and as Tory influence deepens on boards this may begin to have its impact on the way institutions are run and what the public sees. In the meantime, don’t expect museum high-ups to utter the Tory trigger-word “decolonise” any time soon; an institutional caution around certain areas – the empire, slavery – may put them into conflict with their own audiences and even their workforces, many of whose younger members are increasingly impatient with structural inequalities. More generally, the climate created by a government obsessed by “culture wars” is profoundly damaging. When staff members from a rather dull institution such as Historic England – in charge of listing buildings and monuments – receive threats from the far right, there’s something amiss with the body politic. The Tories should be very careful what they wish for. Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer