British Museum was ‘victim of inside job’, says Osborne

The British Museum was the victim of a long-running inside job that saw records being altered to conceal alleged thefts, chairman George Osborne has said.

Speaking to a culture, media and sport select committee hearing this week, Osborne told MPs that “we were the victims of an inside job by someone who, we believe, over a long period of time was stealing from the museum”.

Osborne said the alleged thefts, which are the subject of an ongoing police investigation, were carried out by someone “entrusted by the organisation to look after them”, and may have taken place over a 20 to 25-year period.

“If that trust is completely abused – as I think will become clear in the coming months, quite a lot of steps were taken to conceal this, and it wasn’t just that these things were taken; records were altered and the like – it is hard to spot,” Osborne said.

Osborne said he had not been surprised that objects could go missing, saying the museum cares for millions of items and records around 100,000 a year, which he described as a “complicated task”.

He said an internal investigation would examine why action was not taken when the institution was first alerted to the alleged thefts by Danish antiques dealer Ittai Gradel in 2021. “That, to my mind, is a big question for the museum,” he said.

He confirmed that Gradel had initially received reassurances from the British Museum that the objects were not stolen, which “is obviously a huge mistake, and is subject to review”, he said.

Osborne told the committee that significant lessons have been learned as a result of the crisis.

“We have changed our whistleblowing code, changed our policy on thefts and tightened up security around the collection, including in the stores. We have an independent review, which we commissioned to give us some lessons learned and recommendations by the end of this year, and we are undertaking a big project […] to digitise the whole collection so that this great national asset is more properly recorded,” said Osborne.

“I don’t want to minimise the damage caused by what happened, but we do want to use these events as an opportunity to ring the changes."

Alongside the hearing, the British Museum announced a five-year plan to digitise its entire collection and make it fully accessible online for the first time, as well as offering enhanced public access to its study rooms. Around half of the museum's eight million objects are already digitised, with 2.4 million objects left to upload or upgrade. The remainder constitute items such as stone tool fragments that do not require cataloguing.

Interim director Mark Jones outlined to MPs some of the steps that have been taken to improve security at the museum, such as ensuring no member of staff can go into a strongroom on their own.

These measures “should ensure that the kind of theft that has happened could not happen again”, he said.

Jones, who came out of retirement to lead the museum following the resignation of former director Hartwig Fischer, said the cache of unregistered material targeted by the alleged thefts is “completely exceptional” within the collections.

“It is not the case that the British Museum contains a lot of valuable objects which are unregistered,” said Jones.

The items, which came from the Townley collection, “were thought very lowly of – were despised – in the early 19^th century […] It is a real failure that the initial decision not to register them was never rectified.”

Jones said: “One of the reasons why I am so keen that we not only complete the documentation and digitisation of the collections but make them as accessible as possible is that, in the end, the most sustainable and best security for collections is that they are widely known and widely used. What was wrong here was that these 2,000 objects were really known only to one person, and that person decided to take advantage of that.”

Jones said 350 out of the c.2,000 allegedly stolen artefacts are in the process of being returned. There are plans to display the recovered objects in response to the public interest around the case.