Once in a while, I feel like giving up on this city of ours.

It has a wild, weird and wonderful collection of inhabitants.

Its glamorous and sordid extremes make for a stimulating, if sometimes testing ambience. Yet somehow it is run by a cabal of dreary dullards who do not have an ounce of style, imagination or generosity of spirit between them.

More than a year ago, there was enormous civic pride and self-congratulatory hoo-hah from those running the Brighton Festival when it was announced Nick Dodds, administrative director of the Edinburgh Festival, had been lured to Brighton.

It was rightly regarded as an important and prestigious appointment. Festival directors and city councillors love to boast Brighton has the biggest and best festival in England - and his arrival confirmed it. So why, if his appointment was such a triumph, do he and his family still have no home.

Why are they practically squatters in temporary accommodation? It is scandalous. I suspect if Nick Dodds knew he would have to subject his wife and children to such an experience, he would never have left Edinburgh.

If anyone on the city council or among the festival directors had any sense of style, any idea of what a successful festival can bring to a community, they would have a fine, city centre home for the use of the incumbent festival maestro. It would be a splendid financial and cultural investment for Brighton. It would be a permanent, cultural centre to be used for entertaining visiting artistes, for small scale performances and for maintaining the profile of the festival all year round - as well as being the home of the chief executive.

All it will take is one person with enough imagination, enough pride in the festival and enough power in the city to make it happen. Perhaps an elected mayor could cut through the bureaucratic sludge to drive such a scheme through. But while I trust Brightonians to vote sensibly for the principle of an elected mayor next month, I am not sure about those seeking the job. None of the names mentioned so far as potential runners inspire me. But that is another story.

Nick Dodds of course is not an artist or a performer. His huge strength is that he can create the environment in which artists and performers blossom and flourish. It is an enviable talent. And yet he suffers from the syndrome in Britain which prevents us celebrating the creativity of our stars. Americans adore the whole concept of stardom. They draw inspiration from it.

In this country, we relish the failures of our stars. We love stories of drink and drugs, ends of affairs, broken marriages and other tabloid fodder.

The American writer Scott Fitzgerald said: "The rich are different." He could equally well have said: "Creative people are different." They are, and they should not be made to live like nomads in our midst.