You examine his words, line by line, and it becomes possible to make an informed guess. Does Serota really say that he thinks the hugely acclaimed new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a seriously deficient museum? That our leading sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, was a bit of a troublesome old codger as a Tate trustee? That he expects the Government to give him a lump-sum payment of £10m to buy new art for his new Tate Gallery of Modern Art at Bankside? That he fears the crowds may vote with their feet and decamp to international modernism in Bankside in 2000, leaving his revamped Gallery of British Art at Millbank the poor relation? No, he does not. He does not say any of these things directly. He is a master of the oblique.

Neither does he acknowledge outright that the Tate has a rather poor collection of classic European modernism, compared with other leading museums - though he comes close. He does not say that the annual conceptualists' shindig, the Turner Prize, has become a Frankenstein's monster, distorting public perceptions of what the Tate and its collections is about. He does not say that he regards the Chelsea studio of the late Francis Bacon - which has now been snapped up by a Dublin gallery - as a poor thing, not worth the Tate's patrician consideration. He does not admit in as many words that some people half-expect him to move on, once the big London reorganisation of the Tate has been completed in 2001. But despite not saying these things - or not in those words, anyway - he touches on these subjects. You are left with the impression that these may well be his views.

This modus operandi, which infuriates some, has worked very well. Serota, now 52, is on the floodtide. As a result of his ten years at the reins - accompanied for most of the time by his moving and shaking former Chairman of trustees, Dennis Stevenson - the Tate will in 2001 achieve an aim that has been intermittently on the agenda through most of the post-war years. Sir Henry Tate's slightly vulgar but much-loved 1897 gallery on Millbank will revert to being the home of purely British art, as the eponymous sugar magnate always wanted. The year before, Serota will already have opened a complete new museum of modern art on Bankside, so doubling the space available to both sides of the Tate's activities: though he expects Millbank to receive fewer visitors after the split. He may seem over-cautious, but of course he cannot be: to achieve this much demands considerably more than a risk-avoiding civil service mentality and that, as he made plain with his first controversial rehang of the Tate in 1990, is not his way.