For a seemingly diffident man, this might seem a painful part of the job, but apparently glad-handing is something which Jones rather enjoys. He and his wife, Camilla (they have two sons and two daughters), became familiar figures on the New Town party circuit.In London the trustees of the V&A are banking on him producing similar results. If the British Galleries do one thing, they show how tatty the rest of the museum is. Running the V&A is as much about housekeeping as scholarship; roofs need repairing, electrics need rewiring, windows replacing. The museum has 145 galleries and it costs about £2m to refurbish one. Jones, using a 10-year master plan by the architectural consultant Stephen Greenberg as his guide, wants to make the courtyard garden the focal point of the museum, open up internal views that have since been blocked up and build Daniel Libeskind’s tower of exploding cubes, called the Spiral, to house contemporary collections.

The director, who once stood as a Labour candidate in local elections also speaks fluent New Labour: he wants better access to the museum via online links and regional branches.It is just as well that he employs such language. Government approval is much needed by the V&A, which was damned as stuffy by a National Audit Office report and by the then culture secretary, Chris Smith, who claimed that people didn’t know what it stood for and gave it six months to improve. Jones, who relishes its boundless variety, says he knows what it is for: “On one level, people come here just to enjoy the objects But essentially we are here to explain the decorative arts. The collections provide us with our opportunities and our purpose. We know people are interested in decoration and they see objects in a sophisticated way.

We see this from the way they respond to programmes about d?r. They can enjoy and learn more here.”Jones will not only have to get on with politicians, but with trustees and curators, too, if he is to avoid the director’s jinx The V&A has been a graveyard for several promising careers. Roy Strong’s directorship was soured by the controversy over the cutting down of the courtyard’s cherry trees and its sponsorship by Pirelli; Elizabeth Esteve-Coll caused uproar with her sacking of expert curators and her crass slogan “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”; while Alan Borg, Jones’s predecessor, brought in compulsory admission charges, oversaw a rapid decline in visitors and fell out with the chair of trustees. There have already been hints of tensions between Jones and the staff, after he urged them to contribute to the funds to refurbish the British Galleries out of their own pockets.There were similar complaints in Scotland, when an audit revealed that staff were stressed and lacked motivation and satisfaction. It led to supportive letters to national newspapers from former colleagues, claiming that “none of us will forget him rolling up his shirtsleeves and sweeping the floor alongside us in the rush to get the new museum [of Scotland] open on time”.