Lord Vaizey of Didcot is a plausible fellow. He was culture minister under David Cameron in what now seems a different epoch, let alone decade. He took over in the year 6 BB (Before Brexit) and one of his jobs, as with all his predecessors, was to explain to the Greek government why they couldn’t have the Parthenon Sculptures (aka the Elgin Marbles) back from the British Museum. Which in his day was presided over by the great universalist Neil MacGregor.
This week I heard Vaizey giving an interview where he explained that he’d changed his mind about “repatriating” the marbles to Greece. Once upon a time, he explained, he’d “drunk the Neil MacGregor Kool-Aid” about maintaining the museum’s great universal collection, but now he
