Focus: You Know Where You Can Stick These (and It's Not in My Museum) ; Now That the Chairman Has Quit, the Design Museum Is in Serious Trouble, Says Stephen Bayley, in a Frank Personal Account of a Row That Started with Flowers

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James Dyson has left a vacuum at the top of the Design Museum. Chairmen should not resign. It is rather as if the Queen were to emigrate, and this to be interpreted as a broad-brush condemnation of the country from its titular head. Dyson's high-pressure cyclonic departure has been one of the week's more colourful entertainments, a stylish spat among peacocks (and hens). Of course, it shows some baroque egos in a harsh light, but more interestingly still, it exposes the fugitive meaning of "design".

The Design Museum is the most thoughtful monument remaining from the sometimes meretricious design decade of the Eighties, although its spirit is much older still. It was …