Category: Uncategorized

Losing his marbles

Since he was Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has opposed the return of stolen artworks to their owners. But it looks like they might be going home anyway

Some of the Parthenon marbles in their current location in the British Museum in London
The Parthenon marbles awaiting return to Greece

In the last few years Dowden hasn’t missed an opportunity to assert that objects like the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes ‘properly reside’ in the British museums and galleries that currently hold them.

As Minister he refused appeals from institutions and governments who wanted their artefacts back and opposed all efforts by trustees and directors to open negotiations or to transfer artefacts. In a notorious letter sent to heads of national collections in September 2020 he carefully connected removing statues of slavers with returning stolen art – classifying both as ‘contested heritage’ and insisting that Government-funded bodies “should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics.”

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

More recently, UK institutions have begun negotiations or have actually returned items. The Horniman museum in South London returned six Benin bronzes last month and Cambridge University has agreed to return 116. Both made use of a provision in a new charities law that allows institutions to ‘deaccession’ items when they perceive there is a ‘moral obligation’ to do so. Mr Dowden doesn’t like this provision and has been asking questions about it in Parliament. Dowden thinks that woke museums may be ‘virtue signalling’ when they agree to return looted items to places “…where they may be less safe.”

Meanwhile, national collections (like the British Museum and the V&A) can’t make use of this provision because they’re bound by another law, the British Museum Act of 1963, which explicitly prohibits return of artefacts. When Culture Secretary, Dowden hoped to suppress this kind of worthy posturing by packing boards of trustees and opposing the appointment of anyone with ‘decolonisation’ on their CVs.

One of his appointments was George Osborne, former Chancellor and the man who brought Britain nine years of austerity – including harsh cuts to museum funding – inserted as Chairman of the British Museum’s board in 2021. Everyone’s assumption was that this appointment would mark a change of direction for the museum – with more pride in the museum’s colonial history and less shame about the awkward provenance of its collection. The Guardian called it ‘a startling jolt‘ and wondered ‘can it it really have come to this?’ As recently as November George Osborne asserted that the great collections ‘would not be permanently broken up‘ but did acknowledge that loans of objects might be possible.

Things are obviously moving quickly now, though. Dowden’s been demoted, resigned and promoted again since then and Osborne is showing signs of having gone native at the BM. We learn, from a Greek report quoted by the Art Newspaper, that he’s actually been in secret discussions with the Greek Culture Ministry, which has long campaigned for the unconditional return of the Parthenon marbles. It looks like a permanent loan might see the marbles taken to the Acropolis Museum, where a specially-built, climate-controlled gallery has been waiting (a loan would allow the museum to get around the tricky provisions of the 1963 law). Experts say that the British Museum’s increasingly ramshackle accommodation risks damaging the marbles and a refurbishment means they’ll have to move soon anyway. Some galleries at the museum are in such poor condition that they’ve had to be closed and one of Osborne’s other priorities is to raise one billion pounds (yes, a billion) to fix the leaky roof and crumbling walls.

It’s safe to say that Dowden’s bluster in the media and public bullying of the institutions haven’t really paid off. The galleries don’t want to be recruited to the Culture Wars and the momentum for return is building. There’s a British campaign group working to return the Parthenon marbles, more museums are opening negotiations and influential Parliamentarians are applying pressure. Lord Vaizey, also a former Culture Secretary, is pursuing a campaign through the House of Lords. Let’s face it, it’s about time.

COBRA assembles

It has begun. Yesterday, Captain Dowden marched into the COBRA situation room – for there is a situation

As we reported last week the PM has put Oliver Dowden in charge of his Winter of Discontent Task Force. Dowden assembled his first responders in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms to begin the fightback against the wretched nurses and posties. The committee will meet once more this week.

An official photograph of Oliver Dowden MP with a British Army captain's hat crudely photoshopped onto his head
Captain Dowden is ready for action

Sounds like there wasn’t much to discuss. Dowden doesn’t have many options: how to deploy a maximum of 2,000 troops available to him and whether civil servants and agency workers might be persuaded to break strikes. Well over a million workers will strike or are balloting to strike in December and January – rail workers, ambulance drivers, Eurostar crews, bus drivers, highways workers, baggage handlers, postal workers, nurses, driving examiners and civil servants – so the government’s emergency measures will be mainly symbolic.

A photo of the secret UK government Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms beneath Whitehall, showing a large conference table and a wall of monitors. This is the only photo that exists of the facility - released by the government in response to a FOI request in 2010.
The only photo that exists of the secret Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms

We know that 600 military drivers have been asked to “familiarise themselves with vehicles” so they can drive ambulances for the 21 and 28 December strikes. 10,000 drivers will be on strike on those days and they have promised to continue to provide emergency cover so it’s not clear how much the troops will be able to help – probably mostly photo opportunities. Dowden’s press team has been sending out robust quotes, of course. He’s ‘straining every sinew’ apparently (in Scotland there’ll be no strike because nurses have accepted an average 7.5% pay increase).

We’re in the phase of the crisis when Ministers stamp their feet and talk tough. On the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Transport Minister Mark Harper insisted that rail workers must accept what he euphemistically calls ‘reform’ while also insisting that the negotiations are nothing to do with him, guv. Justin Webb tried to get Harper to confirm a Financial Times story that he’s been blocking a deal that was acceptable to the unions. The Minister flannelled manfully but essentially accepted the assertion (and used the word ‘reform’ 15 times as he did so). ‘Reform’ is a persistent theme across all the current disputes, of course – the Uberisation of postal services that Simon Thompson proposes, the privatisation of NHS services that Sunak and other Ministers continue to advocate. Pay and conditions are not the only things on the table this Winter.

Meanwhile, it might – or it might not – reassure you to know that, in his Cabinet Office role, Oliver Dowden is also responsible for the government’s wider resilience planning – you know, plagues, energy crises, Winter weather. He answers questions in Parliament on the subject and says things like: “The national resilience framework will be the first iteration of our new strategic approach. It will strengthen the systems, structures and capabilities that underpin the UK’s resilience to all risks.” The new framework was actually first announced back in August by the previous incumbent Kit Malthouse. It’s difficult to know how much confidence to invest in a new ‘resilience framework’ from the people who brought you over 200,000 Covid deaths, a near-death bond market crisis, Michelle Mone and an epidemic of child poverty. Perhaps we should wait and see.

Dowden’s Fusiliers

Our MP has been in his new job for six weeks. He’s the most senior minister in the Cabinet Office and he has an epic to-do list. His first big battle is with hundreds of thousands of striking workers

Dad's Army
Don’t panic

The government’s website lists the many responsibilities of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster: driving delivery of the Government’s priorities, oversight of all Cabinet Office policy, oversight of civil contingencies and resilience (inc. COBR), national security including cyber security, oversight of Cabinet Office business planning, oversight of major events, propriety and ethics, oversight of cabinet work on science, technology, and innovation, including oversight of the Office of Science and Technology Strategy (OSTS), public appointments, honours and the GREAT campaign.

This long list will suit Oliver Dowden. It’s evident that he likes to be in the thick of it and, during his years in various bagman roles for his party, he’s developed a reputation as a ‘fixer’, an operator. He’s the new Michael Gove.

Now that the balloon’s gone up

An official photograph of Oliver Dowden MP with a British Army captain's hat crudely photoshopped onto his head
Captain Dowden is ready for action

Dowden’s first combat mission sees him taking command of the Prime Minister’s new industrial action taskforce. There’s nothing on the government’s website about the taskforce yet so we can’t be 100% sure what it’s called. The Daily Mail is calling it a Winter of Discontent Unit while trade paper Personnel Today has gone with Strike Response Unit. Either way, it’s obviously a high-risk job – and more evidence that Dowden is ready to get his hands dirty. You really don’t want to carry the ‘Minister for the Winter of Discontent’ label around with you for the rest of your career if it goes badly.

With union membership climbing, public support for strikes at its highest level for decades and the public service workers comfortably on the moral high ground, there’s a chance that Captain Dowden will find himself supervising a chaotic retreat. Remember, only one government in UK history has been brought down by industrial action and it was a Tory government during a cost-of-living crisis. Just saying.

A few ideas for how to deal with runaway strikes have emerged so far and there are some old chestnuts. What are Dowden’s options in his battle with the nurses, border guards, ambulance drivers and fire-fighters?

The military option

At any one time no more than a few thousand soldiers are available to cover for striking workers. Even fewer are qualified to do specialist jobs like driving ambulances or nursing the sick. There’s some hurried training going on but a lot of people are going on strike (at least 100,000 RCN nurses for a start). It’s hard to know what impact the soldiers can have across the whole public sector. History shows that bringing the army in is mostly about the symbolism. Incidentally, according to the Independent, the government’s crash course apparently takes in non-military volunteers, so if you’d like to add ‘strike-breaking’ to your CV, you might want to drop Oliver Dowden a line. Perhaps there’s a VIP lane.

Soldiers fighting a fire in the 1970s

The military option is risky. Nothing says ‘crisis’ better than pictures of soldiers fighting fires and staffing A&E departments on the TV news. And when they’re covering for workers who have high levels of public support there’s a strong chance it’ll make things worse, dialling up the tension and antagonising ordinary people. Captain Dowden might fancy himself at the head of a column of green goddesses, or saluting the troops as he strides purposefully into a hastily erected field hospital, but Britons don’t generally like to see the military on the streets unless it’s a parade.

Making it harder to strike

In this country we routinely talk about the right to strike – and it’s a meaningful phrase but in Britain there’s no such right. No law protects the right to withdraw your labour and, in the absence of a written constitution, there’s no resort to fundamental rights. This is why it’s so easy for governments to withdraw or diminish the ability to strike.

We think of the Thatcher era as the golden age of anti-worker legislation – between 1980 and 1993, Conservative governments passed six acts of Parliament limiting workers’ power to go on strike – but the last 100 years in Britain have seen an almost uninterrupted succession of efforts to contain and frustrate the freedom of workers to take action. From the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, which stopped ‘sympathy strikes’ (and also made it harder for unions to give money to the Labour Party), to Barbara Castle’s 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, which introduced compulsory strike ballots, to Tony Blair’s Employment Relations Act that was supposed to guarantee union recognition but actually did nothing of the sort.

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

More recently, the present government’s 2016 Act introduced new obstacles to calling strikes and was meant to make moments like this impossible. If these rules had existed during the original Winter of Discontent many of the strikes would have been illegal. An awkward fact for the government is that the unions have risen to the challenge – administering hundreds of votes across multiple employers, complying with all of the new rules to the letter and winning big majorities for action. In the most recent RMT vote the turnout was 71% and 89% voted to strike. The Royal College of Nursing had to run separate postal votes for over 200 NHS trusts plus other providers and even where votes did not reach the threshold for action huge numbers of nurses voted to strike. This was not supposed to happen and if decent wage offers are not forthcoming there’s every prospect of future strikes in areas that voted not to on this occasion.

The government’s response, of course, is more legislation. A bill to provide for ‘minimum service levels’ will reach Parliament in the new year and it may be expanded to ban ‘blue light strikes’ all together. The concern for Sunak must be that suppressing the expression of workers’ anger and desperation by banning strikes can do nothing to improve his electoral prospects. Unhappy workers are unhappy voters.

Agencies and strike-breakers

Legislation that allows employers to bring in agency workers to cover for strikers was hastily introduced earlier this year but the government has now said that commercial health companies will be invited to provide cover too. Both tricky, of course, especially in schools and the NHS, where there’s grass-roots support for strikers and where agency staff may find they’re unwelcome. Some agency suppliers have said they don’t want to be involved in strike-breaking and private hospitals may not want to see pickets in their leafy grounds. Strike breaking in Britain is part of the folk memory, of course. A ‘volunteer police force’ was got up to suppress strikes in Liverpool in 1911. During the General Strike The Times rallied volunteers to join an oddball group of toffs and fascists called The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, which sounds kind of like Dad’s Army in black shirts.

Anyway, in case the Minister is planning to make his name by recruiting a volunteer force of his own we’d like to put it on record now that it ought to be called ‘Dowden’s Fusiliers’.

Has Oliver Dowden finally joined the club?

When you resign as a Minister you have to wait three months before you can start to take money from a hedge fund

Looking out through a revolving door at the entrance to an office building, the street visible outside - by Bradley Huchteman on Flickr
A revolving door – Bradley Huchteman

Some might say that one of the good things about our MP, across the seven years since he was first elected, has been his apparent distance from the unsavoury cronyism and money-grubbing that many in his party enjoy. Perhaps it’s because he didn’t come into politics via the Eton -> Oxford -> City of London pipeline. He started without the thick address book of boardroom connections and pals in Belgravia investment funds that so many old-school Tory MPs rely on.

We won’t claim to have kept a very close eye on Mr Dowden’s entries in the register of members’ interests but we can’t recall any dodgy sources of funding or spectacular bungs or ‘dark money’ – and, of course, he entered Parliament years after the expenses scandal and decades after the torrid era of cash for questions and the golden age of Tory sleaze. Clean hands.

So Dowden’s constituents haven’t had to worry about all the mysterious payments, holidays on private islands, research trips to exotic locations or even the usual long list of directorships and advisory roles that other Tory MPs go in for. He’s been a hard-working representative for Hertsmere and he’s not been closely associated with any of the scandals and screw-ups that have ripped through his party and the government in the last few years. Perhaps it was naive to expect a rising home counties MP to stay out of all this indefinitely, though. The pressure on any MP, especially when you’ve just voluntarily given up your Ministerial salary, must be real.

Dowden’s latest entry in the register records what might be an important rite of passage – his first decent-sized payment from a hedge fund. £8,398 from Caxton Associates LP in Berkeley Square for twelve hours of ‘policy advice’ provided between 24 September and 24 October 2022 (that’s an hourly rate of £700).

The dates here are important. When a minister (or a senior civil servant) wants to take up a paying job or a role that might cause a conflict of interest, they first have to consult with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, ‘an advisory non-departmental public body’, sponsored by the Cabinet Office. Oliver Dowden evidently did this after his resignation as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio on 24 June. The committee’s advice (a seven-page letter) makes it clear that there would have to be a clear three months between stepping down as a Minister and taking up the Caxton role. You won’t need us to calculate for you that 24 September is exactly three months after Dowden’s resignation.

Of course, this is also why Dowden’s contract with Caxton ended on 24 October, the day before he took up his present role as a Cabinet Office Minister in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet.

So why would a hedge fund want a back-bench MP on the payroll, even if only for a month? ‘Duh’, you might say. But, in this case, the answer’s in the kind of hedge fund we’re talking about. Caxton Associates is a ‘global macro hedge fund’, a fund whose job is closely connected to politics. Investopedia says:

Global macro hedge funds are actively managed funds that attempt to profit from broad market swings caused by political or economic events. Global macro hedge funds are market bets around economic events. Investors use financial instruments to create short or long positions based on the outcomes they predict as a result of their research. A market bet on an event can cover a wide variety of assets and instruments including options, futures, currencies, index funds, bonds, and commodities. The goal is to find the right mix of assets to maximize returns if the predicted outcome occurs.

Investopedia

All hedge funds protect investors from risk by making bets that will pay off if things go wrong. Macro hedge funds like Caxton protect their clients from the policies and actions of governments – particularly when they affect interest rates, currency movements, equity and bond markets – by making clever bets against them. Some hedge funds are said to have made enormous sums from betting against (‘shorting’) the pound and the UK economy after Kwasi Kwarteng threw everything in the air.

Caxton Associates’ boss, Andrew Law, is a major Tory donor who supported Liz Truss’s campaign for the leadership and happens also to have hosted the famous 23 September cocktail party – on the evening of the mini budget – that Kwarteng attended. It’s assumed that Dowden wasn’t invited to that party, of course, although his engagement with Law’s hedge fund began on the next day.

How all this works is a mystery to us. How Dowden, a card-carrying member of the anti-growth coalition, a Sunak supporter who vocally opposed Liz Truss, winds up advising a hedge fund that supported her campaign, literally the day after the catastrophic mini budget, is likely to remain mysterious. The ACOBA letter says it was ‘updated on 22 November’ but it’s not clear when Dowden informed the committee that he intended to take up the Caxton job. Perhaps he applied for the job after his resignation from Johnson’s cabinet but before he made his opposition to team Truss’s voodoo economics public. Perhaps hedge funds don’t care much about the political complexion of the politicians they pay for.

We’re tempted to speculate that a short period out of office like this – Dowden’s first since he was appointed Paymaster General in July 2019 – offers an opportunity for a generous supporter like Andrew Law to funnel some funds into an MP’s bank account in a way they haven’t been allowed to during his period in Ministerial office. It’s certainly hard to imagine Dowden sitting down to provide twelve hours of policy advice during that torrid month.

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

And this is before we even get to Pierce Protocols Limited, an interesting ‘art services’ firm founded in 2005 that provides publishing and technology services for artists and is also involved in the febrile world of NFTs (cryptographically unique artworks), employing 66 people and turning over £19.8M in 2021. Under the brand name Heni the firm publishes monographs and editions of prints by famous artists like Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George and Sabine Moritz. Most of the company’s income comes from the editions. In 2021 there was a modest profit. The company has also provided the crypto technology behind Damien Hirst’s latest stunt The Currency.

According to the register, beginning on the same day as his payments from the hedge fund (remember the three-month rule?), Pierce Protocols began to pay Oliver Dowden £5,000 per month, for eight to ten hours of work (still a pretty decent hourly rate of between £500 and £625), ‘until further notice’, although the payments also stopped when our MP was appointed to the Sunak cabinet (there’s an ACOBA letter about this job too). We’re inclined to use the word ‘mysterious’ again here because, well, to be honest, the Damien Hirst-Oliver Dowden connection is not one we expected to be writing about right now. We certainly would not have guessed, back when Dowden was walking the leafy streets of his constituency, eulogising privet hedges, that a role in the trendy art world was in his future. But perhaps getting a former Culture Secretary on the books might be considered a win for any business at the cutting edge of the art business and shouldn’t be considered mysterious at all.

Defending the indefensible

Media training for Ministers of the Crown must now include excusing the indiscretions of people you probably think are beneath contempt

Sir Gavin Williamson MP behind a big desk with a union flag behind him
Boris Johnson literally knighted this man

In the past, when ministers broke the rules, made egregious errors or just royally embarrassed themselves, the routine was fairly simple. You resigned sharpish and – depending on the severity of your offence – were cast into outer darkness (the House of Lords), left politics all together or, in the fullness of time were rehabilitated and reinserted to the cabinet as if nothing had happened (sometimes more than once).

More recently, in the period, roughly speaking, between the beginning of the coalition government in 2010 and the chaos of Brexit, the routine changed. Something about the rise of populism, the bracing free-for-all of the new politics, means the norms have been rewritten. Now, when disgraced, a politician can be expected to cling to power – sometimes for months on end, sometimes indefinitely – with the petulance of a haughty toddler. The honourable resignation, the dignified retreat from public life – these are now thought to be signs of political weakness, hopelessly outdated remnants of a prissier political era. Only wimps resign.

For the muscular populists of the post-political era, the polite traditions of 20th Century politics are not just an inconvenience, they’re part of the problem. Decorum, sobriety, propriety – all are no longer sources of legitimacy but evidence of establishment paralysis. Trashing political norms is not incidental to the project – it’s fundamental. And it’s a self-reproducing behaviour. Once a majority of pols are responding to crises in this way it becomes essentially impossible to do so in the old way. When politics shifts and everyone around you is shameless, resigning when found out becomes essentially unpolitical, unstrategic. You’d look like a mug so you hang on until the storm passes (or you’re literally forced onto a plane home to be publicly fired).

So a necessary part of the new routine is the ritual interrogation of the miscreant’s colleagues. It’s an accepted part of the job. Whoever shows up in the studio to answer questions about that day’s big story will, as a matter of routine, be asked to justify the errant minister’s continued presence in the cabinet. There’s a fairly static repertoire of responses – “it would be wrong to pre-judge the official inquiry”, “the minister has apologised and is now 100% focused on delivery of the government’s ambitious programme”, “the minister has the full support of the Prime Minister.”

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's cabinet, seated around the cabinet table in Number 10 in October 2022

Given the size of a modern cabinet – (31 ministers attend Rishi Sunak’s cabinet) – there’s always at least one minister in disgrace. In recent times it’s regularly been two or three and, in the remarkable period that came to a close in August, it was often the Prime Minister himself. So the likelihood you’ll be grilled about a colleague’s indiscretions is high. You need to be across the story. In the official car on the way to the studio the minister is reading papers about their own brief, about wider policy and about the antisocial behaviour of a fellow minister. It’s all in a day’s work.

Oliver Dowden is thrilled to be asked about Gavin Williamson

So when our MP Oliver Dowden showed up in Laura Kuenssberg’s studio on Sunday he had to have the Gavin Williamson story down pat. The timing of his appointment to his current role, the status of the inquiry launched when Wendy Morton made her complaint, whether or not the Prime Minister had seen the screenshots of Williamson’s latest outburst. All committed to memory – the man’s a pro. Williamson, who was knighted by Boris Johnson after an earlier sequence of screw-ups (remember the lockdown exam chaos, the one-sided row with Marcus Rashford over feeding poor kids – and the Maro Itoje mix-up, of course – and that Department of Defence leak?), at least nominally reports to Dowden, so that must make it all a bit more real. In the interview Dowden made use of a fairly flimsy ‘heat of the moment’ defence and made the slightly ungracious implication that nobody liked Wendy Morton anyway (“it was no secret that Gavin Williamson, and others indeed, didn’t enjoy a good relationship with the Chief Whip at the time…”).

Williamson’s texts to the Chief Whip, of course, are probably a blessed relief for the government, keeping the Home Secretary’s more consequential string of cock-ups off the front page for a day or two. But the clock is ticking.

Dowden’s new vocation

Our MP has been grilling ministers about a new charities law – but it’s really all about the Culture Wars

The Parthenon Marbles in their current location the British Museum in London
Some of the Parthenon Marbles in their current location

The new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is now busy answering questions on behalf of the Cabinet Office but in his final days as a backbencher he was packing in the written questions. This time he was asking the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (his old gaff, of course) questions about the Charities Act 2022. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, his recent questions relate to the return of stolen artworks to their countries of origin. You’ll remember that, in a previous life, Oliver Dowden very publicly argued that artefacts brought to Britain during the colonial era should stay where they are and, in particular, in the UK’s national collections.

While Culture secretary, and in the midst of the row over statues of slavers and war criminals, he wrote to UK institutions asking them not to touch controversial items and famously threatened them with loss of funding if they considered removing or returning objects:

It is imperative that you continue to act impartially, in line with your publicly funded status, and not in a way that brings this into question. This is especially important as we enter a challenging Comprehensive Spending Review, in which all government spending will rightly be scrutinised.

Lines from Dowden’s ‘retain and explain’ letter, sent in September 2020

It looks like this is going to be an important cause for our MP – alongside the important local issues of yellow lines in Aldenham and building on the green belt. It’s not obvious why a home counties MP would want to invest much in the profoundly controversial argument between a former Imperial power and its once colonised territories. There are evidently some Culture Wars points to be won with the Tory base but it’s difficult to find a morally consistent defence for retaining the Benin Bronzes or the Parthenon sculptures. The risk of being very visibly on the wrong side of history is real.

So far Dowden has offered no positive defence for retaining the objects at all but has continued to make the odd case that returning stolen goods might be some kind of woke gesture and to repeat his demeaning statements about the fitness of the original owners of these artefacts to look after them. In the Commons two weeks ago he said “…those institutions risk facing a barrage of claims for restitution, some of which may be encouraged more by virtue signalling”, “I can assure you that if we allow this Pandora’s box to open, we will regret it for generations to come as we see those artefacts being removed to countries where they may be less safe.” (our emphasis).

Meanwhile it must be a colossal wind-up for the former Culture Minister that institutions – including his own alma mater – are busy shipping artefacts home or making agreements to do so (Oxford, Cambridge and Aberdeen Universities, The Horniman Museum, Glasgow City Council and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter to name just the most recent). Governments are acting too – a huge agreement between the German and Nigerian governments links development funding and trade with the return of over a thousand bronzes.

The government’s stance is intriguing but also puzzling, not least because it obviously hasn’t occurred to anyone that clinging to colonial-era loot, talking down to allies and potential trading partners (and Commonwealth members) and using shallow legalistic defences to profoundly moral appeals is not very ‘Global Britain’ and might just contribute to Britain’s growing isolation.

Dowden’s questions to the DCMS relate to a new law regulating charities. The law itself is not concerned with stolen artworks directly but the Charities Act 2022 introduces a new freedom for charitable bodies to to seek authorisation if they feel compelled ‘by a moral obligation’ to make a transfer of charity property (called in the act an ‘ex-gratia payment’).

This was meant to allow charities more flexibility in dealing with awkward bequests and the law, passed back in February, has not yet come into force. In the meantime, though, it’s occurred to ministers that this new flexibility could allow museums (which are usually charities) to apply to return stolen artworks.

Dowden’s fear is obviously that we could see a flood of applications from woke charity trustees who want to return items to their countries of origin on spurious ‘moral’ grounds. Current legislation makes it illegal for the national collections to do this, so the government has already decided to delay the implementation of the new law while they think about “the implications for the national collections.”

Dowden asked the Minister “if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the implementation of sections 15 and 16 of the Charities Act 2022 on the ability of trustees of national museums […] to return collection items if they are motivated by a moral obligation.” What’s fascinating – and a bit dispiriting – about all this is that, for our MP, ‘moral obligation’ is a euphemism for ‘shallow woke virtue signalling’.

Is this going to be a big story in the two years between now and the next general election? Probably not. Will it keep Oliver Dowden in the news for a hot-button Culture Wars issue? Quite possibly.

And he’s back in the room…

Oliver Dowden’s progress around the fringes of the Cabinet continues. This time he’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

The new Prime Minister’s cabinet is coming together. Oliver Dowden has moved sideways. Bringing his sequence up to date: Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office (9 January 2018 – 24 July 2019), Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office (24 July 2019 – 13 February 2020), Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (13 February 2020 – 15 September 2021), Minister without Portfolio and Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party (15 September 2021 – 24 June 2022), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (25 October 2022-)

So far the only full ministerial role on the list is the Culture job – a position created by John Major in 1992 and expanded along the way to accommodate media, sport, the Olympics, the amorphous ‘digital’ and, more recently, the Culture Wars. It was in this role that Dowden was first asked to take on woke street names and unisex toilets (our Culture Wars coverage is here). Also when he took up the cause of the British Museum and the stolen artefacts.

So now our MP is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It’s a sinecure. One of the roles used to accommodate ministers a leader might need later. To be honest we’re a bit disappointed. We thought Dowden was due a bigger role in a Sunak Cabinet – he was among the first MPs to come out in support of the new PM and he bust a gut campaigning for him the first time round.

But, because the role has no particular function, its holder can choose to focus on whatever they want – provided the boss is happy. A civil servant looks after the Duchy’s enormous property portfolio these days, so Dowden will be able to take up any cause he fancies. We’ll be interested to see if he returns to the fight to keep the stolen Benin Bronzes in London.


Are the Tories about to go full Berlusconi?

The Bungafication of the Conservative Party

Is it possible that the Conservative Party is going to recycle its last Prime Minister, the one who was kicked out amidst multiple scandals after sixty of his ministers resigned in despair? Yes it is.

A composite image showing Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi and British politician Boris Johnson side by side, both covering their faces with their palms
The Brotherhood of Party Animals

SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE. Sunak has achieved the 100 nominations he needs to go through to the members’ vote, according to his supporters, but he’s not said he’ll stand yet. Seems likely he will, though, since close allies, including Oliver Dowden, are tweeting their support. Johnson lags behind but, according to the lists kept by those in the know, he’s still in second place with MPs (and he’s back from the Dominican Republic). In a twist we probably should have anticipated, according to one reporter, Tory members are pressuring their MPs to support Johnson, in some cases threatening them with deselection. Penny Mordaunt, currently in a pretty poor third place, is the first to say she’s standing. A lot could change over the weekend, though.

Screenshot of betting for Conservative leader at 2pm on 21 October 2022

FRIDAY’S POST. To be clear, after an early surge in support Thursday night, Boris Johnson has now settled to second-favourite to replace Liz Truss as leader with the bookmakers, behind his nemesis Rishi Sunak. The insiders tracking MPs’ support for the likely candidates also have Johnson second behind Sunak (Cautious Conservative Home, more gung-ho Guido Fawkes). Paul Goodman, grizzled observer of the party, says Johnson is unlikely to pass the nomination threshold. In case you were wondering, the best you’ll get on Oliver Dowden is 200-1 – and his odds are drifting. Save your money. He’s still firmly on and is apparently busy surveying MPs about their support for the former Chancellor. Meanwhile, our conscientious MP still has his head down and has been asking technical questions of the DCMS. Always fascinating to note that the ordinary business of Parliament goes on, no matter what else is happening.

As we often say here, we’re not insiders. We’re not in the torrid WhatsApp groups. We just watch the news like you do. So we can’t be sure that the Tories will embrace full Bungafication and appoint Johnson again. Some red wall MPs have convinced themselves only Johnson can save their seats. Members, ever divorced from reality, are obviously up for it. Donors seem keen too.

Boris Johnson is obviously not Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian tycoon’s rap sheet is a yard long, he’s a fraud and a serial abuser. He’s been expelled from and re-entered politics half a dozen times but, remarkably, he’s returning to government and he’s embroiled in another potentially career-ending scandal as we write.

But Johnson’s debt to the original political party animal is evident. His resilience in the face of scandal, his flexibility with regard to the truth and his jaw-dropping readiness to brazen out catastrophes political, legal and parental is pure Berlusconi. As is his style of ‘governing-as-campaigning’ – for leaders of the Berlusconi-Johnson variety, there’s no steady period of heads-down government between campaigns. It’s all-campaigning-all-the-time.

The Economist's cover for October 22 - 28 2022, with an illustration showing UK Prime Minister Liz Truss as Britannia holding huge fork loaded with spaghetti. The headline reads 'Welcome to Britaly'

We’re not the only ones to see the resemblance to Italian politics in the current crisis. The Economist’s latest cover is headed ‘Welcome to Britaly’ and the leader article finds a close resemblance to recent Italian history: “A country of political instability, low growth and subordination to the bond markets.” The Italians themselves are furious about the comparison, which they say is insulting (although it mostly seems to be the spaghetti they’re unhappy with). There are jokes about the insertion of a technocratic caretaker Prime Minister (remember when Merkel and the European Commission removed Berlusconi from power? Brexit took that option off the table). People are calling Jeremy Hunt ‘the British Mario Draghi‘.

Bringing Johnson back would surely complete the analogy. Buona fortuna Gran Bretagna!

Regime chaos

Labour MP Chris Bryant took this picture of the chaos in the voting lobby of the House of Commons on 19 October 2022
Labour MP Chris Bryant photographed the chaos in the lobbies

The entertaining, not to say South-American, scenes in the Commons last night did not cover the Mother of Parliaments in glory. Politics nerds will enjoy the irony, though, that the chaos was actually caused by Ed Miliband, whose canny last-minute anti-fracking bill put the government on the spot.

If Miliband’s motion had succeeded, Parliament would have had to consider legislation to ban fracking all together – an attempt by Labour to ‘take control of the order paper’, to quote a Tory whip. Ruth Edwards, Conservative MP for Rushcliffe, put it well when she said in the house that the motion “enabled the opposition to force colleagues to choose between voting against our manifesto and voting to lose the whip.”

Dozens of Tory MPs, including ministers, refused the choice, and abstained, exposing themselves, in principle, to losing the whip. MPs, on the other hand, representing constituencies affected by fracking, who supported the government in the vote have now, of course, exposed themselves to the anger of their constituents. Talk about a cleft stick. Clever Ed.

Our MP, Oliver Dowden, did manage to squeeze through the chaos to cast his vote against the Labour motion and thus in favour of fracking. Hertsmere is at least a hundred miles from the nearest proposed fracking site and, in fact, the geology of our region means there’s no risk of fracking here ever, so what he was really voting for was fracking in other people’s back yards.

Dowden didn’t speak in the short debate and wasn’t to be seen in the lobbies when reporters were looking for opinions (there was no shortage of opinions). And although the beleaguered Prime Minister has begun to fill the gaps in her cabinet with political opponents – member and famous chancer Grant Shapps is now Home Secretary – it doesn’t look like Dowden’s phone has been ringing off the hook.

”I love the Benin bronzes”

“I think they properly reside in the British Museum…”

We might have been wrong about our MP. He might be a Culture Warrior after all.

(It seems odd to be writing about ancient art while the nation descends into chaos but the business of Parliament goes on and the former Culture Minister has been on his feet in the Commons).

When you’re a Minister on the way up you’re often required to earnestly throw yourself into supporting the most ridiculous policies. To stand in front of a camera with a straight face and endorse absolute rubbish as if it were your own very splendid idea and one you’d die for if called upon to do so.

Bracelet, Edo artist, 17th-18th century – Smithsonian

This is how I read Oliver Dowden’s resolute opposition to the return of stolen artworks, when he made the case during his time as Culture Secretary. It seemed obvious. To suggest that museums in Britain should retain works like the Parthenon friezes and the Benin bronzes, often stolen in the most brutal circumstances or by subterfuge is a logical and ethical solecism. Surely this was just a bit of populist cant for the friendly press?

The Benin bronzes, in particular, surely provide the ugliest case study. The circumstances of their theft, by British soldiers, the fact that essentially the whole legacy of the culture that produced them was removed by force and distributed to the capital cities of Europe and the USA. Keeping them here would be indefensible.

For over 120 years, the only way for a Nigerian to see this extraordinary evidence of their own history has been to travel to London or Berlin and visit the institutions complicit in its theft. It’s unsupportable.

The pressure for return is not new, of course. You might be old enough to remember that a campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens was begun over forty years ago by Greek Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri. Calls from the Nigerian government for the return of the bronzes were made in the 1970s. Over the years UK governments have responded by introducing legislation that legally prevents institutions from returning looted treasures.

Some governments and institutions have begun to act. The Smithsonian in Washington DC has returned all 29 of the Benin artworks in its collection. The Horniman museum has agreed to return its collection of 72 bronzes, as have museums in Cambridge and Aberdeen. In Germany federal and state governments and museums have signed an ambitious agreement with the Nigerian government for the return of over 1,000 pieces. The pressure is building.

For the British government, though, in the era of chaotic populism and theatrical anti-wokery, return is still off the agenda. And the issue of ownership and return has been rolled up with the question of ‘contested heritage‘. For the Culture Warriors, tipping slavers’ statues into the harbour and changing colonial-era street names is basically the same as returning artworks to the places they were made. Unthinkable.

But what’s fascinating about this is that it looks like Dowden actually meant it. My assumption that his opposition to returning artefacts was just an eager minister doing his job was wrong. He actually opposes the return of the bronzes. We know this because he’s used his very first opportunity to stand up in the House of Commons in this session, as a free agent with no ministerial obligations, to raise the issue. There was a debate on the issue in the Lords. Dowden asks:

We are very blessed in this nation to have world-class museums. They are museums of the world, and the world comes to them. One of the bulwarks they have against constant claims of restitution is both the British Museum Act 1963 and the National Heritage Act 1983, and I am aware that there will be a debate in the other place about changes to the 1983 Act. Can I ask the Leader of the House whether we can have a debate in this place so that Members have an opportunity to express their support for that legislation? Otherwise, those institutions risk facing a barrage of claims for restitution, some of which may be encouraged by virtue signalling. I can assure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that if we allow this Pandora’s box to open, we will regret it for generations to come as we see such artefacts being removed to countries where they may be less safe.

(Dowden’s question: HC Deb, 13 October 2022, c275)

And, of course, with our current government – such as it is – he’s pushing at an open door. Even the profoundly demeaning and condescending construction “…removed to countries where they may be less safe” apparently elicited nods around the chamber and the approval of the current Minister Penny Mordaunt. She says the government has no plans to revisit the act.

Dowden’s specific fear, in raising the acts of Parliament, is that they represent the final line of defence for institutions like the British Museum, which holds over 900 Benin bronzes. When your museum is stocked so comprehensively with material that doesn’t belong to you, it’s vital to be able to point to the law of the land in your defence. For decades the British Museum has been able to refer to the 1963 British Museum act, for instance, in saying roughly “listen, guys, we’d love to send your stuff back but it’s out of our hands, we just can’t do it. It would be illegal.”

Any change to the law making it easier for claims to be considered would remove that blanket protection. Each request would have to be considered on its own merits. Looting, complicity in theft, trade in stolen goods – all would become prosecutable. Curators fear that their collections would evaporate over night, that they’d lose control over the process and be left custodians of halls full of plaster casts and empty plinths. You should have thought of that when you were filling your museums with loot, we find ourselves saying.

Justice, restitution, morality? Not on your nelly, says Oliver Dowden.

The clip at the top is an edit of Dowden’s Channel 4 News appearance from American satirical show ‘Last Week Tonight’. It’s revealing because presenter John Oliver, who calls Dowden “that offensively English man”, essentially regards Dowden’s perspective as indefensible, anachronistic, immoral. The government and Conservative legislators are evidently happy for Britain to become more and more isolated on this matter.