How do you solve a problem like Rod Liddle?

‘We must never hide anything,’ declared the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, three years ago, when criticised for disrespecting its greatest founding genius, Sir Hans Sloane, because, through marriage, he had profited from slave labour. Sloane’s Rysbrack bust was now to be presented, he said, ‘in the exploitative context of the British Empire’. So it would take a heart of stone not to laugh now that Dr Fischer has been forced to resign for failing to raise the alarm – even with his chairman, George Osborne – that hundreds of objects have disappeared from the museum’s collections through a long-standing inside job. He disparaged the exterior expert who had warned him of the thefts. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Dr Fischer suddenly announced that the BM was ‘aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter’. With Dr Fischer’s departure, one hopes a spirit-and-soul realignment can take place, in favour of the museum’s core purpose and proper practices. It is not easy, however, to remedy the theft problem. ‘De-accession’ rules which prevent the sale of almost all objects accepted are necessary, but they do land the BM with literally millions of what German collections call zweite garnitur. Sloane’s collection alone amounts to nearly 100,000 objects. Proper cataloguing is a most meticulous business (look up, for example, the marvellous BM online inventory of its two million prints and numerous drawings). It would probably cost too much time and money to do every object. The system therefore depends on trust. Whoever did this over so many years is the museum world’s equivalent of Kim Philby – not a petty thief, but a great traitor.