[NEWS] British Museum Names Former Chancellor George Osborne as Board Chair


June 25, 2021  



The British Museum. COURTESY THE THE BRITISH MUSEUM 



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.





George Osbourne. Photo: altogetherfool/Flickr. 



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.”





Twitter @George_Osborne 



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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