Elgin Marbles

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Lexden for securing this debate. It is right that we should debate this subject because it cannot be left just to museums. There is obviously room to debate the legal case. I think Lord Elgin’s actions were possibly a little murky; nevertheless, our legal case is good. I also think that is not the point. The point is what we do now, rather than what happened in the past.

Personally, I have never been so convinced by the moral, artistic and cultural arguments for the position we take. The Parthenon marbles are a special situation and we should try to find a special solution. They are one of the supreme expressions of ancient Greek, hence western, art. They were created for a specific building and a specific cultural context. In contrast to much ancient sculpture, we know exactly what that context was and what the work of art was intended to signify. These are not just random museum exhibits and, for as long as they are not seen as a whole, they are less than the sum of their parts.

I was lucky enough to learn Greek in Greece, when the Foreign Office still invested in such things, and I have lived in Cyprus. I have no doubt been influenced by that experience, but it has also enabled me to see the argument from the Greek perspective. For us, the marbles are just one exhibit—albeit a very important one—in our national museums, but for Greece they are part of the national identity and a national cultural cause. As we saw from what was, I am afraid, the slightly dismissive treatment of Prime Minister Mitsotakis the other week, they have the capacity to disrupt a relationship that really ought to be a lot better than it is.

We should try to find a solution, but I also wonder whether a loan is the right way forward. I admit that I am slightly unconvinced by it. It seems like a solution that has been shaped by the existence of the 1963 Act, which rightly prohibits the museum from alienating its collections. I am afraid that is a very necessary protection nowadays against the tendencies of too many museum curators. The problem with a loan is that it keeps the issue and the arguments alive when we should try to settle this for good.

My personal view is that it is a time for a grand gesture, and only the Government can make it. It is to offer to return the marbles as a one-off gift to Greece from this country, but as part of and on condition of a new, wider Anglo-Greek cultural partnership. That partnership could have three elements, but many others. First, a museum partnership, high-quality reproductions of the marbles in London plus an agreement by Greece to loan some of its most famous works of art, temporarily, in return—perhaps beyond London as well. Secondly, a wider cultural partnership, perhaps a bilateral foundation, largely financed by the, I am sure, many wealthy private individuals with an interest in this question, to try to take academic and scholarly collaboration to a new level, and an agreement to relax or eliminate restrictions—because the barriers are much stronger on the Greek side than ours—on language teaching, cultural work, artistic performance by each other’s citizens and so on. Thirdly, and finally, a joint campaign to return to Greece those parts of the marbles that are in other museums globally, for it should not be forgotten that, although the British Museum has most of those that are not in Athens, it does not have them all.

Such a partnership would have to definitively set aside for good the rights and wrongs of the original acquisition. It would also have to be clear that it was not a precedent for restitution demands for any other museum exhibit. But it would show that we actually mean it when we see the marbles as part of our common inheritance, and that we can move beyond the “What we have, we hold” approach we take on so many occasions. Perhaps we could rise to the occasion this time and make a deal.