• Sharing history 

There’s an irony about Britain once again getting its hands on this artefact – which was made in Kent and describes one of the most significant years in English history – considering how many of the other items in the Museum were created elsewhere but now reside permanently in WC1. The Parthenon Marbles immediately spring to mind. In 2019, Geoffrey Robertson QC described the Museum as “the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods.”

Defenders, including the Museum itself, might say that it stepped in to prevent things being destroyed which it was able to look after better than the original owners. Many, for instance, might wish the BM had got its hands on some of the irreplaceable treasures that have been dynamited by the Taliban.

There’s also the wider question of whether an artefact should, of necessity and by right, be forever rooted in the place it originated. After all, the human race isn’t. We started off in east Africa and have since spread everywhere. As these objects are expressions of our thoughts and culture – which moved with us – do they really belong anywhere in particular? The more influential the piece, the more this observation seems to apply. On the other hand, what right does anyone have to remove it?

To argue the point again the other way, it’s also moot whether any current country – none of which existed in the form it does now when the object was created – has any particular right. Every state has at one time stolen land from its neighbours. No one has a clean pair of hands.

• Possession

Perhaps a more pragmatic argument is needed.

In The Maltese Falcon – one of the few film adaptations which rises above the high standards of the original book – Kaspar Gutman and Sam Spade have several discussions about the eponymous avian treasure for which all the main characters are hunting. The question of rightful ownership comes up.

“Well, sir,” Gutman purrs, “you might say it belonged to the King of Spain, but I don’t see how you can honestly grant anybody else clear title to it – except by right of possession.” That seems to be the view that the British Musem (and many others like it) seems to have adopted.

On the matter of thefts, there’s another aspect to the affair. In the last few years it’s been reported than at least 2,000 objects have been stolen from the BM’s collection and vaults. Some have been recovered and an investigation continues into who was responsible. President Macron and the Trustees of the Bayeux Museum will be hoping that La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde doesn’t get nicked as well. Now, that would be embarrassing.

• Osborne 

One of the results of the hot weather is that 7am often finds me up and dressed and driving off for a long swim at the Hungerford Leisure Centre before I quite know what I’m doing. This happened most recently on Wednesday. As I only ever listen to the radio in the car, I have in this way been exposed to BBC R4’s Today programme: still (I think) regarded as one of the main opinion-setters of the day.

That morning, George Osborne was on the show. I missed the beginning but think the pretext was the Tapestry: Osborne has been the Chair of the BM since 2021. As he spoke, I marvelled, not for the first time, at the extent to which he’s been rewarded with jobs and dignities out of proportion to his achievements.

He will, of course, be most remembered for his Chancellorship between 2010 and 2016. This was characterised by the guiding principle of austerity. According to many opinions, this accomplished none of its intended goals and was in any case, or so some maintain, predicated on an error in an Excel spreadsheet.

By the time I tuned in, the conversation was moving on to whether recent governments had managed to solve the problems of the UK’s economy. As Osborne caused, or failed to solve, several of them, he was in a uniquely good – or perhaps bad – position to answer this.

His response was that no Chancellor since 2016 had really put the economy at the top of their list, before sniffily going on to say that being an ex-Chancellor used to be quite rare but that there had been so many since that it’s become a “debased currency”. (He has a point: there were three between 1997 and 2016 and seven since then, four of these in 2022 alone.)

The main reason for this, he suggested, was that the government had been reacting to other threats (indeed, the four catosptophic horsemen of Brexit, Covid, Truss and Putin have dominated life since 2016 in unbroken succession). The first of these, though, was Brexit.

Whose fault was this? Cameron’s, and his. It wasn’t necessary to call the referendum, unless you regard curing rifts in the Conservative party as a vital national mission. By the time the vote was held, Osborne’s economic policies had contributed to many feeling they were worse off, left behind or marginislised, and so with little to lose from an eye-catching change.

The government then compunded these errors by mounting a campaign that was, as Osborne himself later admitted, badly misjudged on almost every level.

The debate was toxic and divisive. The eventual decision to leave the EU has led to challenges of re-shaping our relationships with others which we haven’t yet solved. Indeed, even the UK’s own relationship with itself is in a difficult place due to the shock discovery that there was a land frontier between the UK and the EU in Ireland. This has had the lawyers and diplomats tied up in knots ever since.

Of course, Osborne has done OK. The 2010 slogan of “we’re all in this together” clearly only applied to a very narrow group people at the top of the tree. Even if he just sits at home and stares at the wallpaper, he can be comforted by the fact that this is working for him as well: the designer-wallpaper firm of Osborne and Little has been the main original source of his family’s wealth.

• Words

Never mind the opinions that the Today programme expresses: there’s also the question of the language that’s used.

English changes all the time and that’s a good thing. It’s not micro-managed as, in different ways, are the languages in France and North Korea. It’s like a vast, untameable river that sometimes breaks its banks or finds new tributaries. Each of us can use it as we wish. The more influential we are, the more our version will become part of the accepted or “correct” version.

From the late fifteenth century, many aspects of London English became the norm due to the  spread of the new-fangled invention of printing, most of the early presses being based in the capital. In the same way, London time became national when the railways spread across the land in the mid-nineteenth century.

Location is probably now a less important factor in shaping language than is class. I’m not talking about traditional social classes but the scribbling and chattering class which, to a disproportionate extent, develops and effectively approves new linguistic norms. Few programmes can be more influential in this way than Today. Apart from anything else, it catches many of us when we’re still half asleep and filled with not enough coffee.

• Around

Take one verbal tic which I heard three times during the twenty or so minutes I was listening to the programme: the use of “around”. We don’t talk about anything any more: we have “conversations around” it. If you talk around something, surely you circle the issue, never quite daring or being able to nail it. And yet the exact opposite is what’s meant. On another occasion, the interviewer said that there were “concerns around” a certain issue. 

I could work out what was meant, of course. It’s all part of the process by public figures and those who report on them to force words to work harder. The intention is to make it seem that the issue, the reaction or the resulting catastrophe is bigger, more important and more interesting than it really is. To “have a conversation around” an issue seems so much interesting and inclusive than boring old “discussing it”. In fact, it uses more words to say less.

• Change

It may be that “around” will catch on big time: indeed it probably already has. In such a process, there’s an awkward time when the word is holding onto its original meaning and also trying to colonise a new one. The test is surely whether the new meaning is needed, or useful. With “around” it isn’t.

Words that have successfully made this step include “programme”, “gay”, “text” and “entitlement” . All have expanded into a gap that needed filling.

One where this has happened less well is “nice”, now widely used (though also shunned) to descibe something blandly pleasant. In the process its original meaning of a subtle distinction has withered away. Nothing else has replaced it. In these times of confrontational debate, shares, likes and fake news, perhaps the concept of a subtle distinction is no longer considered necessary. Certainly we’ve largely lost a useful word to describe it.

• Horizon

The first part of Sir Wyn William’s report into the massive Post Office scandal was published this week and you can see the whole document here. This is mainly concerned with human impact, which Sir Wyn has always said should be “at the forefront” of his work and report. For that reason, this was the part he’s published first. Other sections will follow, each of which will doubtless cause the perpetrators increasing unease.

This one is bad enough. In the first of its 345 pages, he makes the following observation, which in many ways sums up the entire inquiry:

 And finally…

• Anyone who doubts that Paris St Germain are the best team in the world needs look no further than their dismantling of serial winners of everything, Real Madrid, in the Club World Cup semi final. If I were Chelsea, PSG’s final opponents, I’d be very afraid.

• Opinions differ as to the accuracy of aspects of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Road, which has recently been filmed. The Observer contends that the events that led up to the author and her husband losing their home and embarking on their walk are “very different” from how they’re portayed in the book. Raynor Winn, as reported in the BBC, has denied the allegation, saying that “this is the true story of our journey”: although the walk was not the aspect of the tale that The Observer claimed was false. Both the publishers and the film producers said they perfomed all necessary due dilligence. On 9 July, Winn issued this statement on her website to refute the claims.

I know nothing of the matter other than what I’ve read in the above articles. It does seem odd, however, that a book would have contained statements that, if false, would be so easy to expose as such: equally odd that the allegations have taken seven years to come to light.

• I can remember the searing heatwave in 1976 and it seems that this is now being regularly repeated: indeed, we’ve had three this summer alone. This article in The Conversation suggests that romanticising the 1970s event risks making today’s warnings about heatwaves, climate change and public health “seem exaggerated. These rose-tinted memories obscure a darker truth…”

• Two new political parties might be about to be launched. One, in the UK, would be a left-wing Corbyn-ite creature that plans to do to Labour what Reform is doing to the Tories. At present, it has no leader (or leaders: even that point is in doubt) and no name. One strategist working with the nascent entity claimed that it be both “bottom-up and top-down”, whatever that means.

In the USA, Elon Musk has vowed to launch a centrist creature which has been provisionally called “The America Party”. Trump has described the idea as “ridiculous” and Musk as “a train wreck”. Two obvious problems for Musk are that he lacks anything like Trump’s mercurial charisma and that he wasn’t born in the USA, so making him unable to stand as its leader.

What success might either of these have? Long-held political axioms in both countries have been fast evaporating. If you were to have suggested in 2014 that within ten years Trump would have fought three presidential elections and won two and that Reform would poll over four million votes in a general election, you’d have been quietly asked to leave the room. Nothing is certain any more…

Across the area