Bayeux sophistry

First published in The Critic on 15 September 2026. The text below is the author’s submitted version; the published version may differ slightly after editing. (Working title: “A Tale of Two Loans”.)

All the excitement for the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum reminds me of a 2004 intervention in the Parthenon Sculptures debate by Professor Edouard Wolter of the University of Luxembourg, who was comparing the Tapestry to the Parthenon frieze: both long, narrow, continuous bands recording a defining civic event for the regime that commissioned them. I remembered Wolter’s piece specifically because Nicholas Cullinan, the British Museum's director, has spent this autumn drawing the very same comparison to a rather different end, suggesting that the Tapestry's loan to London this year might show the way to a loan of the Marbles to Athens as well.

Sensing an opening, or possibly just standing near a very long embroidery, Dr Cullinan told the Financial Times that the Bayeux Tapestry's arrival in London this autumn was "a very compelling example of international partnership," a "reciprocal exchange" that "might provide a glimmer of possibility to move forward" on the Marbles. A few weeks later, pressed on the same point by the Times, he dropped the hedging altogether: asked point-blank whether Bayeux sets a precedent for the Marbles, he said simply: "I hope so" and, doubling down, added: "we need more of these, not fewer."

It is worth being precise about what actually happened with the Tapestry, because precision is exactly what this comparison lacks, and precision is exactly what Professor Wolter (unlike Dr Cullinan) troubled himself with. France lent Britain an object it owns outright in exchange for the British Museum lending French institutions Sutton Hoo treasures, the Lewis Chessmen, and treasures of all four home nations, objects it likewise owns outright, on equally agreed terms. And this is even though the Tapestry was most likely woven in Britain, and its symbolic value as the "birth certificate" of this country could, at the very least, justify the cheeky thought of never giving it back. Two sovereign owners, two national collections, one reciprocal contract, no dispute about title on either side and a lot of mutual respect between the partners. That is what a reciprocal loan is. Can Dr Cullinan seriously suggest the same term can be applied to an arrangement in which one party disputes the other's ownership of the object entirely, has said so in terms as blunt as any diplomatic language permits, and has built its entire case for forty years on the principle that accepting a loan would mean conceding the argument it refuses to concede? Can he seriously contemplate partnering on a loan with someone who wouldn’t even accept using the word loan in the first place?

You cannot borrow trust from a country that has told you, repeatedly and in writing, that lending the Marbles is itself an insult. Moreover, this is not news: Greece "does not recognise possession, ownership, and control" by the British Museum "at all," as Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni put it. A categorical position from which no loan, however scholarly, however “reciprocal”, however carefully hedged with "glimmers of possibility," can ever be exempted. Even Cullinan's own escape clause that "every case is different," that Bayeux merely proves cooperation is possible "where there is goodwill on both sides", gives the game away: goodwill on both sides is precisely the one commodity this dispute has never had, not once, not since Elgin’s day.

While Cullinan was daydreaming, the British Museum was quietly getting on with an actual, functioning loan: two fragments identified as belonging to the Parthenon's east pediment (the one depicting the Birth of Athena) and a fragment of drapery are going to the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt this November for an exhibition on the pediment's iconography, running until next July. This is precisely the kind of scholarly, internationally collaborative gesture the British Museum’s director says he wants more of. So how did Athens respond to the invitation to send nine of its own Acropolis Museum fragments to sit alongside them, in the same exhibition, for the same scholarly purpose? On 1 September, Greece's Central Archaeological Council voted it down flat and unanimously, on grounds that amounted, once the press accounts are stripped of euphemisms, to one fact: British Museum fragments would be in the room, and to put their own fragments next to them would be a tacit acknowledgement of equal dignity as owners of their respective loaned material. In one word: unacceptable. If Athens won't lend Frankfurt pieces whose ownership was never disputed, the idea that it would extend the same courtesy to London over the very pieces at the heart of the entire dispute is just foolish. It is theatre for an audience that hasn't bothered to check the facts.

Of course there is a less flattering reading of Cullinan's enthusiasm: floating the Bayeux comparison looks good on camera, while costing him nothing whatsoever. He makes the beau geste — "reciprocal exchange," "glimmer of possibility," the whole vocabulary of enlightened cultural diplomacy — and banks the brownie points that come with it in the near-certainty, confirmed that same week over an exhibition nobody even disputes, that Greece's own conduct will ensure the offer is never actually tested. A risk-free magnanimity, paid for entirely by Athens's intransigence.

But there is more. Sir Keir Starmer's government, whatever else can be said of it, had at least gone on record in favour of the loan: if a loan agreement were reached between the British Museum and Greece, the government “would not stand in the way”. A passive position, and one it did little to advance once the talks it presided over stalled, but a position all the same, welcomed by restitution campaigners as a clear step forward.

But Sir Keir is no longer in No. 10, and things have changed pretty quickly. As many will recall, in 2023, as Mayor of Greater Manchester and evidently yet unburdened by any expectation of higher office, Andy Burnham was asked whether the then-chairman of the British Museum, George Osborne, should return the Marbles. He uttered a bold and confident “yes”, and then went further on social media: "Send them back, without conditions. And let's use culture to change the way the world sees Britain." It was the kind of thing said by people who will never have actually to arrange it. But Burnham is Prime Minister now, and when the Financial Times asked him the same question last week, he miraculously discovered that the matter is, upon long and careful reflection, "ultimately... a matter for the British Museum, isn't it? Legally, that is where the issue lies". One must admire the speed of the education: it took roughly three years and one general election for a gift "without conditions" to become someone else's legal problem.

Mr Burnham's formula has been immediately decried as a U-turn by campaigners in the UK, and widely reported as a betrayal in Greece. Not only is it not a commitment to non-interference; it is a refusal to say anything about his own government's disposition at all. To be fair to the Prime Minister, he is not the only one who finds himself in the awkward position of having to contradict his own historic utterances: Boris Johnson did just the same when he first commented on the dispute upon taking the highest office. However, I would be unfair to Mr Johnson if I did not also add that his early enthusiasm goes back all the way to his youth, and has had ample opportunities to be tempered by careful consideration of the wealth of historical evidence in support of the legitimacy of the removals, and of the implications of a hasty restitution.

From my point of view, I cannot but welcome the fact that No. 10 is quietly returning to the relative normality of the position taken by all previous governments. Mr Burnham is right: it is a matter for the British Museum to decide, within the clear limits set by the law. This correction shows that it was Starmer’s government that strayed from the path. But it is also the single most efficient reminder this year of why the British Museum Act 1963, and the trustees' fiduciary duty under it, were set in stone in the first place: to stop precisely this sort of mood-swinging and gesture politics from affecting the national collections.

And if Andy Burnham has arrived, however late in life and by however retreating a route, at the correct answer, we can only hope that -with time- so will do the most obdurate campaigners, and that we will eventually stop hearing nonsense about the Greeks “borrowing” the Elgin Marbles once and for all.