Analysis
Marbles row leaves diplomats reassessing Sunak’s
strategic grip
Patrick
Wintour
Diplomatic
editor
Cancellation of meeting with Greek PM has Europeans
wondering how Cameron will work with No 10
Sat 2 Dec 2023 08.00 GMT
The Greek
foreign minister, Giorgos Gerapetritis, was attending a two-day Nato summit in
Brussels on Tuesday when he received an unexpected message from the British
delegation. The foreign secretary, David Cameron, was hoping the minister might
be available for an unscheduled meeting. There was much to discuss on
migration, as well as the relief operation in Gaza. There was one condition
from the UK: that there be no cameras.
Gerapetritis
readily agreed, and one can only assume it took only an un-minuted raised
eyebrow from Lord Cameron for the former prime minister to distance himself
discreetly from Rishi Sunak’s bizarre decision to cancel a scheduled Downing
Street visit with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, set for 12.30pm
on Tuesday.
No 10 is
keen to leave the diplomatic debris behind. That is not surprising. Only 12% of
British voters think Sunak’s snub was the right decision, according to a YouGov
poll. The official UK account remains that Mitsotakis broke an undertaking not
to talk about ownership of the Parthenon marbles on his four-day visit.
If
Mitsotakis had agreed to this self-censorship, and his aides say it is untrue,
it would have been the first time he had consented to such terms for a visit.
On recent trips, including an address at the London School of Economics in
November 2022, and in a meeting with Boris Johnson in 2021, Mitsotakis, a
Harvard- and LSE-educated former banker, calmly made his case. On the second of
those visits he also held private talks with George Osborne, the former
chancellor and chair of the British Museum, that skirted around a loan deal.
The episode
has left European diplomats in London scratching their heads. Mitsotakis, a
rare thing in European politics as a re-elected incumbent, seems a natural
ideological bedfellow for Sunak.
Moreover,
many diplomats had assumed Cameron’s appointment was a signal that Sunak, with
restricted vision on global issues, was largely subcontracting diplomacy to
Cameron, partly to give Sunak time to focus on the domestic issues on which an
election next year will turn.
The old
arrangement, whereby the foreign secretary was the prime minister’s
errand-runner had been jettisoned, it was assumed, allowing Cameron to bring
some gravitas to Britain’s overseas dealings.
That has
certainly been the mood inside the Foreign Office, where people were impressed
by the quality of Cameron’s address to staff. They felt they had been given an
entry ticket back into the big league. The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu took
the time to meet the UK foreign minister in Israel was a sign that Cameron had
opened doors for Britain.
Now
European diplomats wonder how the Sunak-Cameron relationship will evolve and
whether it denotes the start of a new odd couple in which Cameron will be cast
in the role of a suave Peter Carington while Sunak, implausibly, seeks to
become a latter-day Margaret Thatcher shouting “no, no, no” at passing
foreigners.
In seeking
a rationale for Sunak’s pique, some wonder whether No 10 took the phrase
“culture war” too literally, and hoped Labour could be trapped into describing
the Parthenon marbles as the spoils of British colonialism. In the US after
all, a culture war has been literally fought monument by monument, and there is
no greater monument than these sculptures.
The statues
have a centrality in Greek cultural life that is not shared in the UK. More
than 70% of British people have never visited the British Museum. For some, one
suspects the Parthenon marbles are regarded as a pub game and the Acropolis the
next team Brighton and Hove Albion have drawn in the Europa League.
A third
intriguing theory for Sunak’s behaviour is not the return of the statues, but
of the migrants. A centrepiece of the two men’s planned discussion was supposed
to be an update of 2020’s UK-Greece joint action plan on migration. When it
comes to “stopping the boats”, Mitsotakis has been the more brutal and
effective. The number of people arriving in Greece to seek asylum has
plummeted, partly due to a deal with Turkey. In a less-noticed part of his BBC
interview, Mitsotakis said he noticed a significant proportion of people
arriving in the UK were arriving through legal channels, a point that is made
less diplomatically by Tory backbenchers furious that despite Brexit, net
migration to the UK hit 745,000 in 2022.
Either way
it has left diplomats in London reassessing Sunak’s character, and his
strategic grip.
As one
diplomat pointed out, if the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with his
myriad explosive disagreements with Greece, is prepared to visit Athens next
week in search of a “new chapter in relations”, how is it possible for Sunak to
have such a falling out over the contents of a museum, or what he described as
“a relitigation of the past”?
Moreover,
the tide in cultural diplomacy is running against the “finders keepers” school
advocated by Sunak.
Across
Europe, diplomats are making a considered attempt to address the difficult
issue of colonial restitution, including artefacts stolen at times of unequal
power relationships.
In December
last year, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, travelled to Nigeria
to hand over a set of Benin bronzes, a way of addressing “a dark colonial
history”. The British Museum retains 900 of these bronzes.
Only last
week, German authorities returned 75 archaeological artefacts to the government
of Mexico in a ceremony held at the Mexican embassy in Berlin. The Africa
Museum in Belgium has handed a full inventory of 84,000 items subject to
possible restitution to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both Sicily and
the Vatican have returned fragments of the Parthenon to Greece.
Sunak,
however, has turned his back on that debate, leaving the Foreign Office in a
bind. It is simply not sustainable for British politicians to say it is a
matter for the museums to decide the legitimacy of their contents, and for
museums to say their hands are tied by government laws. At some point, someone
in government will have to address these issues in the round, and not through
gestures.
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