If I were James Purnell, I would be hopping mad.

He helps secure a more generous funding settlement for the Department for Culture than anyone dared hope for.

But now Arts Council England (ACE) – which dispenses the arts allocation to nearly 1,000 bodies across the country – seems to be doing its best to fritter the achievement away.

The current drip-drip revelations of who are the winners and losers in its allocation of grants is causing widespread anger and dismay – and with good cause.

ACE’s contention that no organisation should continue to be funded just because it always has been is absolutely right.

But if funded bodies are expected to be excellent and innovative – the new buzzwords of cultural policy as propounded in the review for Government by former Edinburgh Festival head Brian McMaster – then they do have every right to expect due warning if they are failing to cut the mustard.

Unlike my colleague Norman Lebrecht, I am not a routine Arts Council basher. For the record and for what it is worth, for instance, I know and admire the incoming chief executive Alan Davey whose appointment Norman has roundly criticised.

I have not, until now, commented on the process because my principle job is to report on what I find and the Arts Council already thinks I have been unfairly negative so far.

But the more I have spoken to body after body in recent weeks, the more baffling and shocking the process has seen.

The Arts Council says most of those affected should not have been surprised. They had been warned, it says.

But if so, the warnings were manifestly less than clear. I have attended a string of briefings in the last year or two where Christopher Frayling, the chairman, and Peter Hewitt, the chief executive, intimated that in the face of a less than satisfactory spending settlement, they would not oversee “equal for misery for all”.

But that is a far cry from deciding that, whatever happened, a fifth of bodies would face cuts. The scale of the reductions now is not a consequence of the Government failing to come up trumps but of Arts Council policy.

In which case, I fail to see why it could not have begun to issue warnings to the likely victims far, far earlier. The precise sums obviously had to wait until the new budget for the three years from April was known – and that was alarmingly late, in October.

But why wait until the day after the Northcott Theatre in Exeter opens after a refurbishment to tell it its grant is to be axed?

The Arts Council had long wanted Jacksons Lane arts centre in north London to update its premises – and thanks partly to storm damage and an insurance claim, it has been closed for refurbishment for the last year. It, too, got the devastating letter just as it was preparing to re-open.

And why allow the Bush Theatre to advertise and shortlist for a new executive producer only to announce its £180,000 budget cut exactly as the candidates are supposed to be interviewed? Is that not pertinent information for the contenders?

Few organisations stand a chance of replacing the axed cash in the handful of weeks remaining before the end of the financial year. And it may be that some really aren’t good enough to warrant survival and should go to the wall. I don't know.

But I certainly sympathise with the widespread view among the victims that the way the Arts Council has handled the whole sorry affair scarcely induces confidence in their capacity to identify excellence.

ends