She may have earned the sneers of Erwin Mortier and Tom Lanoye, but she apparently had a direct line to the heart of the electorate. According to a study carried out by Professor Mark Elchardus of the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a team from the University of Ghent, one in three people in Flanders participated in some artistic activity in the last six months. That’s not, like the minister, as a spectator: that’s the number of people who actively “do art” in some form or another.

More than one in four described themselves as “regular” practitioners of the arts, including, in first place, photography (nearly 8% of respondents), playing an instrument, keeping a diary or writing down short pensées, drawing and something called “multimedia”, presumably involving computers, video and/or music.

These regulars are committed: the average amount of time spent on artistic hobbies in a week was 7.6 hours, or the equivalent of three evenings a week. (Or, say, a one-hour piano lesson and less than an hour of practice a day.) The passion, as is so often the case, dies off with age. The number of 14- to 17-year-olds with an artistic hobby is a staggering 64%, or nearly two in three. By the time we reach the over-65s, the proportion drops off to just 12%.