Will Keir Starmer return the Elgin marbles?

They’ve been a political hot potato for decades but with discussions underway between the British and Greek governments, Sean O’Grady asks whether the Labour leader will get serious about returning the sculptures or opt for a quiet life at home while frustrating a foreign power

The Elgin marbles, now officially known as the Parthenon marbles, are in the news yet again. Government sources have been briefing that there have been high-level discussions with the Greek government about a possible return to their country of origin, ie Greece. The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has arrived in London for talks with Keir Starmer. No doubt the disputed antiquities will crop up; no doubt there will be squeals of outrage if there’s any hint that they’ll be leaving the British Museum. It’s a tricky one for the prime minister...

What’s the problem?

The Greeks want them back, and successive British governments have refused to even discuss the matter. They’ve been in the UK since Lord Elgin brought them over in the early 19th century. He supposedly bought them from the Ottoman Empire, the then-occupying power in Greece. Obviously, the Greeks don’t see this as legitimate, and the Turks, unusually, agree with the Greeks, and say there’s no proper evidence of any “sale”. It’s caused bad British relations with Greece for decades. Indeed, last year Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting with Mitsotakis when it was suggested that any kind of deal was going to be on the table.

What’s the answer?

The British Museum Act of 1963, passed by a previous Conservative administration to prevent any shenanigans, outlawed the transfer of the pieces on a permanent basis, ie them being “given away”. However, they could conceivably be “loaned” on a finite or indefinite basis to the Greeks. This is the current favoured option, at least for discussion, on the part of the British Museum. The chair, former Tory chancellor George Osborne, commented last year: “That is, I think, something worth exploring. And we can go on doing it whether or not Rishi Sunak meets the Greek prime minister or not. In fact, if anything, things have been rather clarified by this week. We obviously know we’re not going to get any particular support from the Conservative government.”

So why doesn’t Starmer agree to that?

He’d probably like to, but the deranged political backlash will no doubt prevent him from doing so. Devout philistines – some who have never seen the marbles, never will, and may not even know what they are – would riot rather than permit their departure from these shores. As the cliche goes, in mixed metaphor, the marbles are “iconic”, absurd as it seems. Starmer would suffer devastating, vicious attacks from Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing mainstream media, and offer up an easy, totemic target for performative patriotism by Conservative and Reform UK politicians if he tried to do anything rational.

Would the voters care?

Yes and no. When Tony Blair made a surprisingly determined effort to jettison Gibraltar it did him little electoral harm, albeit he retreated early enough to avoid a real scrap. Such issues rarely feature in election campaigns, but they can form part of a party’s image, as the risky and fortunately successful war waged by Margaret Thatcher to recover the Falklands in 1982 proved.

It’s fair to conclude that those who would blockade the British Museum in protest aren’t going to vote Labour anyway, but Starmer and his colleagues, like all Labour politicians, are permanently vulnerable to the charge that they are unpatriotic, soft, incompetent or, in this case, all three.

The hostile argument would be that as soon as even the most feeble foreign power asks for anything the Labour government simply rolls over – as with the attempt to regularise the international legal status of the Chagos Islands and the UK/US military base on Diego Garcia, and establish Mauritian sovereignty over what was taken away from that country by the British in the run-up to independence in 1968. The usual claim is that the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and various other remnants of the empire will also be “surrendered” without a fight.

Similarly, so the story goes, Labour will hand back the Koh-i-Noor diamond, currently in the British Crown Jewels, to India and all manner of tribal religious artefacts will be returned to First Nations across the globe. National treasures are in jeopardy. Why, we might even have to send Alan Titchmarsh to Beijing simply to appease the Chinese.

What will happen?

The Elgin marbles represent just another front in the culture wars, this time with a genuine cultural treasure at the centre of the row. Given his already meagre political capital, the prime minister will probably judge that upsetting the Greeks is a price worth paying for a quieter life. His real problem may come if Osborne tries to do a deal behind the government’s back, in which case Starmer will be made to look weak and foolish as well as unpatriotic. He’s going to need to be firm if he wants to avoid further political damage for such an absurd reason.