By Mike Pearce

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SO NOW we know. With annual running costs of £2.6 million and an anticipated 160,000 visitors, we shall be forking out £16 a head for everyone entering the Turner centre.

Not forgetting the £17.5 million building costs or the £6 million thrown away on the farcical first attempt.

What irony that the reason given for closing local museums is the subsidy needed for each visitor.

Thanet folk quizzed by papers and television have shown considerable animosity towards the Turner project.

How little their opinions matter was brought home when I lunched some years ago with a very senior council officer.

“Why,” I asked, “do you think people are so opposed to it?”

He smirked and said: “If you ask a********s, that’s the answer you would expect.”

This arrogance typifies the “we know best” stance that has underpinned the Turner cause since it reared its ugly concrete head 10 years ago.

Locals warned that the first scheme wouldn’t work. They were ignored and watched the prototype fall into the sea.

As costs rocketed to levels that frightened even the artistically insane, the smug man who leads KCC assured us a new version was on its way that would cost “not a penny more” than £15 million. (But I suppose an extra couple of million isn’t much to an authority happy to chuck £400,000 into its chief exec’s final wage packet.)

We are patted on the head and assured that Turner will be the making of Margate.

Comparisons are drawn with St Ives (an artistic community with a population of 12,000), Salford (a city of nearly a quarter-of-a-million) and, even more ludicrously, St Tropez, to “prove” that an art gallery will work here.

A bright-eyed buffoon burbled on about visitors looking out from the gallery at the same wonderful views enjoyed by Joe Turner (when he wasn’t getting jiggy with his landlady).

Just as they could look out from the seafront without our having to cough up £17 million.

Wishful thinking is a poor guarantor of success. Evidence suggests that pumping public money into speculative arts projects can be as risky as betting on Gillingham winning an away game.

An article in the Daily Express (unlikely to have been read by the Guardian-reading arts Mafia) revealed how, since 1997, more than £1 billion of public money has been doled out to crisis-hit arts projects.

Here are a few comparisons the Turner proponents might not wish to consider:

The Public, an arts centre in West Bromwich, which was predicted to attract 160,000 visitors a year (sound familiar?). Cost £63 million, with £30 million from the Arts Council, dubbed the Pink Elephant and described as the “biggest arts scandal of the decade”.

Then there was Colchester’s Visual Arts Facility, derided as the “Golden Banana”, and the £26 million Rich Mix multicultural arts centre in East London.

As straight-talking Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers’ Alliance says: “Far too many arts projects are going way over budget and costing ordinary taxpayers a fortune.”

Giving run-down Margate the Turner centre is like giving a starving old woman a Gucci handbag, then asking her to pay for it.

In a few years we shall know whether it is a white elephant or a white knight; whether its benefits will be confined to a few wine bars and coffee shops catering for Londoners popping over from their second homes in Whitstable, or whether it will herald a golden future.

I don’t think it’s got a prayer. But then I’m sure that very senior council officer has me down as one of the “a*******s”.

Plain Jane returns next week.

What do you think? Write to Mike at the Isle of Thanet Gazette, Suite 1, 3rd Floor, Mill Lane House, Mill Lane, Margate, Kent CT9 1JU or email newsdesk.thanet@krnmedia.co.uk