The risk of ‘loaning’ the Elgin Marbles to Greece

Sir Keir Starmer’s government looks ready to smile upon the British Museum’s apparent desire to by-pass the legal prohibition of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens by negotiating a ‘long-term loan’ instead. Since Greece believes that the Marbles were stolen, that ‘loan’ is bound to be permanent.  

The first hint of this came four days after the general election, when Dennis McShane, Labour’s Europe minister from 2002 to 2005, published an article in the Times on 8 July: ‘It would be smart politics to return Elgin Marbles now’. Waxing romantic in his love for the Greece of Lord Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor, he decried Elgin’s ‘crime’ and ‘vandalism’ in ‘hacking off the friezes that were the very origin of western sculpture’ and urged the return of the ‘plundered sculptures’. Britain needs European friends like Greece, he pleaded, and now is the time to strike a deal – as George Osborne, chairman of the museum’s trustees, has advised him – ‘quickly in the first weeks of a new government, when all is in flux and the establishment can be sidelined’.

The next hint came on Monday, when a Times news article suggested that Labour’s vaunted ‘reset’ of relations with Europe could include the museum’s ‘loan’.