There’s only one winner from the Elgin marbles row – George Osborne

Amid the fallout from the latest diplomatic row over the custodianship of the Parthenon marbles (previously known as the Elgin marbles), one general view has quickly taken hold – that Rishi Sunak was petulant and rude to cancel his meeting with the Greek prime minister. I beg to differ.

Imagine Sunak travelling to the USA for a meeting with President Biden, in a politically sensitive year, and first meeting with Trump, and then going on television, when he didn’t need to, and giving a big public interview using strong language around a contentious issue between the two. Do we think Biden would have cancelled that meeting with Sunak? Hell, yes.

Mitsotakis knows Sunak is under pressure, and that young Labour supporters are on the side of restitution. His endgame is not “a loan” as George Osborne, the current chair of the British Museum, keeps suggesting. Mitsotakis wants them returned – even he now describes it as “reunification” not ownership.

Labour quickly took the opportunity of the escalating row to adjust their position on the marbles. Only last year Lucy Powell’s office told me they would not change legislation allowing the marbles to return. Last week, a Labour official said that although Keir Starmer would not allow the sculptures to be removed permanently to Athens – as he won’t amend the British Museum Act of 1963 – “if a loan deal that is mutually acceptable to the British Museum and the Greek government can be agreed, we won’t stand in the way”. A neat political trick, that absolves Starmer of decision making.

It is an unfashionable view to take, but Sunak was quite within his rights to snub Mitsotakis back. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the right action to take. It was probably wiser to have risen above it and restated publicly the marbles under the Tories are staying, full stop. But Sunak was not rude or petulant – the fault lies with the political manoeuvrings of Mitsotakis, who has achieved, as I’ve said, exactly what he wanted. The potential future Labour prime minister played right into his hands, offering our antiquities away.

This is an entirely confected row. And one that leads back to another political tactician, the former chancellor now residing at the British Museum, George Osborne. No one was talking about the marbles much until Osborne arrived there and talked it all up. And what a wonderful PR campaign it has been – not only for Osborne, but also for the British Museum, which is back at the centre of contemporary debate. It’s clever.

And today we now have Osborne’s real position as given this morning to Radio 4’s Today programme, by V&A director, Tristram Hunt, himself also a former politician. Tristram appeared to suggest that he and Osborne are united in wanting the 1963 law repealed – giving them power to do as they see fit with museum collections.

However, sending the marbles back would be a highly reckless move if we ever want them returned. I do not think a museum’s chair or director should have such power. And would Osborne really want his political obituary to describe a man who while in power lost the referendum on the EU and then lost the UK the Parthenon marbles? I don’t think so.

But first let’s consider whether there is any real opportunity underneath all the talk for a sizeable loan of the Greek marbles to their birthplace. Both Starmer and Sunak have made it clear that current legislation will not be changed – this may change, of course. They have both kept the door ajar on the possibility of a loan, with Starmer passing the buck of responsibility on to the museum.

However, there are no items the Greeks own that are equal in value that they could lend as collateral. If the marbles went home, they would never return. Everyone knows that. And I doubt any prime minister would risk losing the marbles unintentionally, nor, as I’ve said, the chair of the British Museum. (They’ve lost enough recently). So, what are we left with? A swap of a few fragments?

More importantly, the Greeks remain immovable on a key point. Their people have long desired the return of these treasures, once part of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple in Athens. In the recently built Acropolis Museum there are empty plinths, each meticulously outlining the shape of the missing sculpture pieces. Museums around the world, and here in London, are already gifting objects back to their land of origin, including the V&A, but the marbles are arguably the most high-profile artworks in the heated debate around restitution. And the British Museum’s strategy has been to establish a model of mutual lending. But for this to work, Mitsotakis must still tacitly agree that the marbles are loaned. And he will never do that.

National identity really matters to the Greeks and so also to its politicians. We have our history of wars with France, our neighbour, but with Greece and its neighbour Turkey, there remains a very real threat of Turkey ratcheting up hostilities again. When you live under constant threat from a neighbour, national pride rises. The marbles have become a key totem of that national identity.

So, we remain at a serious impasse.

Many of you reading this probably believe they should be returned. But let me pose another view. Whether they were obtained legally or illegally by Lord Elgin will never be resolved. Many antiquities were excavated with permission by European archaeological teams, though stripping sections from the actual walls doesn’t seem that defensible.

Was Elgin a wily opportunist or driven to save these great relics from further destruction? Most of the Parthenon friezes and sculptures were destroyed in a huge explosion long before and history could have gone either way. Elgin could not have known. Furthermore, we cannot deny the world’s history is a brutal tale of warring nations, shifting populations, with objects and cultures moving constantly across this globe. We cannot turn the clock back on that.

My wish is that I would see in my lifetime those marbles rotated, say every five years, in a trusted partnership between two nations, both agreeing that we can share rare antiquities in recognition that we now live in local and global communities. But that is going to take a lot of compromise from the Greeks, a proud nation, and a lot of diplomacy and trust from us. And this recent spat has only demonstrated high self-interest on each side, which shows no sign of abating. Politics rules.