June 25, 2021
George Osborne, an investment banker and former editor of
the Evening Standard, has been named the new chair of the board of trustees of
the British Museum. On social media, the appointment generated an outcry
because of Osborne’s history of cutting funding for the arts in the United
Kingdom.
The appointment was unanimously approved by the museum’s
chair search committee, which is comprised of seven trustees and led by
Minouche Shafik, one of the Board’s deputy chairs. Osborne will join the board
on September 1, and is slated to succeed Sir Richard Lambert as chair on
October 4.
“All my life I have loved the British Museum,”
said Osborne in a statement, additionally describing himself as “thrilled” to
head the institution’s board. “To my mind, it is quite simply the greatest
museum in the world. It’s a place that brings cultures together and tells the
story of our common humanity.”
“Together with my colleagues I look forward to
working with George to continue to ensure that the British Museum is the most
innovative, accessible, and inspiring museum of the world, for the world,”
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, said in a statement.
Others in the British arts world were less sanguine.
“After what he did to Britain itself, there’s something truly outrageous about
the fact that George Osborne is now chair of the British Museum,” tweeted
Guardian arts editor Alex Needham. “In a just world he would be pelted with
rotted tomatoes every time he left the house.”
Osborne, in 2001 the youngest Conservative MP ever elected
to the House of Commons, in 2010 became chancellor of the exchequer. That same
year, as part of the austerity measures he implemented to deal with the
government’s debt in the wake of the global financial crisis, he slashed the
budget of the Arts Council England by 30 percent, cutting museum budgets by 15
percent. However, in 2015, a year before leaving that office, he was
characterized as having “spared” the arts in a spending review, specifically
setting aside funds for the British Museum, among other institutions.
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