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Dan Hicks considers whether the cultural sector should view George Osborne’s political past as a warning sign, ahead of his new role as British Museum chairman.

“Buller, Buller!” was the cry as they smashed places up. Now a former member of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club, a student group famed for acts of public vandalism, is to chair the board of trustees of the British Museum. They were immortalised in Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel Decline and Fall as the ‘Bollinger Club’. A posed photograph of the Bullingdon class of 1993 shows George Osborne standing at the edge of the group. Hands on hips in his dark blue tailcoat, mustard yellow waistcoat and white bow tie, he looks into the middle distance. 28 years later, how much damage could he do?

“The real concern is what this appointment says to the rest of the sector,” Alex Sobel MP, the Shadow Minister for Tourism & Heritage, tells me. As Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2010 and 2016, Osborne oversaw cuts to public funding through the post-crash austerity programme. Many saw this as cultural vandalism. In 2017 the Mendoza Review of Museums in England found that museum funding had been reduced by 13% over the previous decade, with some museums seeing larger cuts, and others closing altogether. “All the evidence suggests he only knows how to denude our cultural sector,” Sobel concludes.

Others have concerns over Osborne’s connections with the oil industry, given the current debate about whether the British Museum’s sponsorship deal with BP will end. The activist group Culture Unstained has successfully campaigned for oil sponsorship to be dropped by the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, National Galleries Scotland, Southbank Centre and BFI. They have published seven reasons why in their view Osborne would have a conflict of interest on this question... Keep reading on Elephant Magazine.