Give back the Elgin Marbles you ‘stole’, Greek PM tells Boris

Has anyone told him of Bojo’s cunning ruse to hand Athens fibreglass replicas?

THE 200-year-old row over the Elgin Marbles will flare up again this week when the Greek Prime Minister meets Boris Johnson to demand the return of the ‘stolen’ sculptures.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis has offered to lend some of his country’s treasures to the British Museum in exchange for the return of the Marbles, which were taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812.

Mr Johnson said earlier this year that the Government was not prepared to alter its ‘firm long-standing position’ on the sculptures, which ‘is that they were legally acquired by Scots peer Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time and have been legally owned by the British Museum’s trustees since their acquisition’.

Mr Johnson has not always been so diplomatic. When he was first brought on to the Tory front bench as Shadow Arts Minister in 2004, he provocatively suggested solving the dispute by presenting Athens with an ‘indistinguishable replica’ of the Marbles made out of fibreglass. That is not understood to be currently under consideration.

A decade later, when he was London Mayor, Mr Johnson became embroiled in a war of words with film star George Clooney, who said that returning the Marbles was ‘probably the right thing to do’.

The Mayor said of Clooney, who was promoting his film The Monuments Men about how millions of artworks stolen by the Nazis were rescued and returned to their owners: ‘Someone urgently needs to restore George Clooney’s marbles.

‘Here he is plugging a film about looted Nazi art without realising that Goring himself had plans to plunder the British Museum.’

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph yesterday, Mr Mitsotakis said:

‘Our position is very clear. The Marbles were stolen in the 19th Century, they belong in the Acropolis Museum and we need to discuss this issue in earnest.

‘I am sure that if there was a willingness on the part of the Government to move, we could find an arrangement with the British Museum in terms of us sending abroad cultural treasures, on loan, which have never left the country.’

Referring to the two men’s forthcoming meeting, he added: ‘Refusing to discuss the topic seems to me, given the context of everything that has been happening in terms of the return of cultural treasures, to be rather an anachronistic approach. It would be a fantastic statement by what Boris calls Global Britain if they were to move on this and look at it through a completely different lens’. A Government spokesman said: ‘The UK has a long-standing position on this issue – the Parthenon Sculptures were acquired legally in accordance with the law at the time. ‘The British Museum operates independently of the Government and free from political interference. All decisions relating to collections are taken by the museum’s trustees.’