Just after Labour’s big win in May 1997 I cadged a lift from the new culture secretary, Chris Smith, now Lord Smith and head of a Cambridge college. In the car I asked him if he would look at the issue of the Parthenon Marbles.
He, like most of the north London intelligentsia, deplored the vandalism of Lord Elgin, who used the protection of the Royal Navy and Greece’s occupation by Ottoman Turks to get away with hacking off the friezes that were the very origin of western sculpture. The noble lord sold them to the British government to pay for his divorce. It was as if William the Conqueror had helped himself to some of the columns of Stonehenge to put on display back home in France.
It was self-evident to my 1968 generation, in love with the Greece of Lord Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor and horrified at the military takeover in 1967, that Elgin’s crime could not stand and the marbles should go home. But as I asked Smith about the stolen sculptures, he froze in fear. “Please, Denis, don’t raise this in parliament.” I realised instantly that Tony Blair, whatever his own views, did not want a fight with the powerful Hellenist establishment and its reach via public school and Oxbridge classics education into every corner of Whitehall.
Today, as nearly every museum in Europe and even the Vatican have agreed to the restitution of stolen art, the British Museum stands alone in insisting the plundered sculptures must stay in London. The museum’s chair, George Osborne, told me a couple of years ago that the marbles could go home only if it were agreed quickly in the first weeks of a new government, when all is in flux and the establishment can be sidelined.
Britain needs friends in Europe after the disastrous Brexit diplomacy of Johnson-Truss-Sunak. Greece has a vigorous centre-right government whose prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has refused alliances with hard-right parties like France’s National Rally and can be a useful ally.
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The Acropolis Museum, Europe’s recently built architectural masterpiece, has a beautiful light-suffused gallery for the marbles. Greek philanthropists and Mitsotakis have offered to send priceless treasures from early Greece to London in exchange for the marbles, so British Hellenists will have new sculptures from 2,500 years ago to study.
Lisa Nandy, the new culture secretary, has the reputation of speaking truth to Labour power-holders. Can she persuade Sir Keir Starmer to do the right thing and restore the marbles, thus showing Britain to be a nation confident and proud of its wider European roots and history
Denis MacShane was Europe minister from 2002 to 2005
