I was asked to comment on Newsnight about the thefts at the British Museum.

There are some odd aspects to this story, if one is to believe the information about it which is available online (for understandable reasons, not much is).

The first and most obvious is that the thefts were first reported to the museum by Dr. Ittai Gradel, a Danish scholar of antiquities, in February 2021 who was able to identify (from the museum’s own online catalogue) antiquities – apparently classical gems with a known provenance, including from the Townley Collection (some were listed in the museum’s published catalogue) – which were available for sale on ebay and was even easily able to identify who was offering them for sale because the person used their twitter handle ‘Sultan 1966’. At this stage, all the museum’s alarm bells should have sounded. Theft is the worst thing that can happen in a museum and there must have been well-established procedures for investigating and dealing with theft. Someone apparently conducted an enquiry into the reported thefts and discovered that the three objects which had been reported missing were not missing after all. So how could this have happened, if, as now appears, the objects had already been sold ? The most likely explanation must be that the investigation was conducted by the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman antiquities, who was the person most qualified to know. The museum decided that nothing wrong had happened, reassured Dr. Gradel, and no further investigation was undertaken until it was discovered more recently that up to 2000 objects had been stolen and offered for sale, a catastrophe for the museum in every way.

The second thing which is odd is that the thefts were apparently also reported by one of the trustees, Sir Paul Ruddock, to the museum’s chairman in October 2022, nearly a year ago, presumably because it was by then well known to large numbers of people within the museum and its wider scholarly community that the thefts had taken place and possibly still were. At this point, one might think that it could have been sensible to involve the police, both in order to prevent further thefts and, also, if possible, to facilitate the task of recovery, which will be difficult, but presumably not impossible since the purchasers of the objects will have been recorded by ebay. Did this happen ?

A committee of enquiry is being conducted by Sir Nigel Boardman, a recently retired trustee. He needs to look carefully and openly about what went wrong, which will require some forensic investigation and a lot of soul searching.