The British Museum knows a thing or two about handling stolen art – ask the Greeks

The theft of some 2,000 artefacts has sparked calls for other ‘stolen’ items to be returned to their rightful homes, writes Denis MacShane, none more contentious than the shamefully plundered Parthenon marbles

The Parthenon marbles were all sawn off or hacked off with axes in the early 19th century by a syphilitic Tory minor aristocrat (PA Archive)

Is there any institution integral to the British establishment’s self-importance that is fit for purpose? The police, the army, NHS maternity wards, the BBC, honest government, the Foreign Office, parliament – all the pillars of our self-regarding complacency are now global laughing stocks.

The latest icon to collapse is the British Museum. It is impossible to follow the twists and turns over stolen works of art from the museum, under its incompetent leadership and self-referring management.

The list of the trustees of the British Museum is a roll call of the self-satisfied great and the good. There are assorted Dames, including a former High Mistress of St Paul’s School – the chairman of the trustees, George Osborne, went to St Paul’s for boys. Philipp Hildebrand, a big cheese at the investment firm BlackRock, which paid Osborne £650,000, is a trustee. Then there is everyone’s favourite classicist, Mary Beard, who at least knows something about Hellenist works of art.

The German director of the British Museum, Hartweg Fisher, has shown he is a good Roman as he falls on his sword to protect the fabulously rich self-important trustees who control the museum.

In 2020, an Anglican priest, Professor Martin Henig spotted that a Roman gemstone, was being sold over the net but it had been stolen from the British Museum. In 2021, a Danish art dealer, Ittai Gradel, found evidence of other artefacts for sale which belonged to the museum.

They sent in details of the crimes but, like other disgraced pillars of the British establishment, the British Museum went into full cover-up mode, insulting and denigrating the whistleblowers. Fisher was due to leave anyway this autumn. His number two has been assigned to different duties, in the time-honoured way of covering up establishment failures.

Yet the British media – especially the BBC – has so far been complicit in the scandal. The one thing that is never mentioned is the British Museum’s biggest stolen art collection: the 2,500-year-old Elgin marbles, now officially known as the Parthenon marbles.

The marbles have an extraordinary hold over the English establishment. Perfectly sensible, cultivated professors and those in the charge of culture on behalf of the government go weak at the knees at any suggestion Britain might make good the biggest act of imperial looting and cultural vandalism in British, indeed European, history.

At the start of the Tony Blair government in 1997, I found myself in a car with the newly appointed culture secretary, Chris Smith. He was an old friend, of the same generation that hitchhiked to Greece in the 1960s as students and wondered in awe at the glory of the buildings and sculpture in the birthplace of European civilisation, philosophy, theatre, and democracy.

It was then axiomatic, in 1997, that now the philistine governments of James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major were in the dustbin of history, the brave and bold New Labour government would agree with the anglophile film star, Melina Mercouri, Greece’s stellar culture minister, that the marbles should go home to where they belonged.

I asked Chris what arrangements would be made for their return. He froze in terror. “Please, please Denis, do not bring up the marbles in parliament and don’t mention your interest to anyone at No 10. ”

He did not have to spell out why. Blair’s success was in part based on his brilliant seduction of the establishment, known as “the blob”. The military loved him because he kept giving them campaigns to fight and win as in Kosovo, or Sierra Leone or East Timor. The City loved him because he made them all much richer. Rupert Murdoch loved him because he refused to contemplate fully entering the European Union without first holding a referendum on the Euro, which everyone in Whitehall knew wouldn’t happen.

And Smith knew that if he went to Blair and asked about returning the marbles his ministerial career would soon end.

No one knows who the current culture minister is. He or she has no national profile. There is a polite campaign for a return of the marbles, but they have found it hard to get a hearing from future Labour ministers. And Labour has been strangely silent in demanding action over the thefts, despite the British Museum board being packed with super-rich business leaders close enough to the Tory party and headed by a former Tory chancellor who imposed austerity on Britain to give us the UK’s worst performing decade in centuries.

The marbles were all sawn off or hacked off with axes in the early 19th century by a syphilitic Tory minor aristocrat, Lord Elgin. He claimed he had written permission from the Turkish occupiers of Athens, but there is no evidence of any such document. In any case, it would have as much validity as an authorisation issued in the Second World War by a German Kommandant in occupied France to some foreigner who wanted to steal priceless French art.

Elgin bribed local officials to allow his workmen to vandalise the front of the Parthenon. He brought the friezes and other components of the founding moment in European art back to England, helped by the Royal Navy, then at the height of its imperial arrogance. Needing money for a divorce, he sold them to the British government and, ever since, ministers and professors have defended the looting and plunder.

Greece is now a solidly rooted democracy and deserves to be treated with a little respect, not the disdain of politicians who helped promote Brexit. London has few friends in the European Union and the re-elected centre-right government of Greece has many.

Many suggestions have been made to find solutions using the incredible AI capacity of modern archaeology to send the illegal London marbles back to where they belong, while bringing a new flow of Hellenistic artefacts to London and creating precise copies for tourists to wonder at.

It won’t happen under the present establishment but the greatest act of cultural looting in European history will at some stage be put right.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of Europe who writes on French politics and appears regularly on French TV and radio