Mr Osborne, let us find our nerve again

Dear George Osborne ,

We have, you and I, a great deal in common. The same sort of background - comfortable, advantaged, raised on the quiet assumption that the institutions of this country are broadly on your side. The same school, as it happens. The same fluency in how Britain works, who to call, which committee actually decides things. You, I note, have done a good deal more with it than I have! - but que sera.

There is one difference. I’m Jewish.

I mention it only because it is the reason I can see something you appear, just now, to have missed. It puts us on no opposite sides. We are on the same side - the side that loves these institutions, that believes the British Museum one of the genuine glories of our civilisation. I’m simply standing at an angle from which one failure is impossible not to see. So I’m writing to point it out, as someone who shares the freehold, not someone throwing stones from the street.

Here is what was meant to happen at your museum on the twenty-eighth of May. A lunchtime talk, an hour, no more. Paul Collins, your Keeper of the Middle East and one of the world’s authorities on Assyrian sculpture, was to stand in the Assyrian galleries and describe carvings that have been in British keeping since 1856: the Lachish reliefs, the army of Sennacherib storming a fortress town of the kingdom of Judah, forty miles from Jerusalem, in 701 BC. Battering rams against the walls. The king on his throne, receiving the conquered. Your own museum once chose those reliefs as one of the hundred objects through which Britain told the history of the world - not the history of the Jews, the history of the world, in Britain’s voice.

And here is the part I’d ask you to sit with. Sennacherib carved his triumph in stone, and his empire is gone. Nineveh is a ruin in the Iraqi earth. He took Lachish - but never Jerusalem, and the people whose town he sacked are still here. The monument a great empire raised to crushing a small people survives only as something that people’s descendants come to a museum to explain. That is the subject of the talk you cancelled. Not a grievance. Not a territory. Endurance - the plain fact that the things which set out to erase this people end up in glass cases, labelled, while the people go on putting the kettle on.

That was the hour. A scholar, his own collection, the oldest story there is about lasting. Called off the morning before, in the words of your ticketing office, for “security concerns.”

I want to be careful and exact about who failed here, because the failure was not one thing. It was four things, all of them courteous, and you were only one of them.

The museum failed first. Told that people had booked places intending to wreck the event, it concluded that the safer course was to remove the event rather than the wreckers. Your statement said the decision was made “to protect the event, not to diminish it” - a sentence that does not improve with re-reading. You cannot protect a talk by cancelling it any more than you can protect a patient by declining to operate. What was protected was not the event. It was the institution’s afternoon.

And there was a second failure folded inside the first, quieter and worse. The museum asked the Jewish community whether the event should be postponed - sought our view, made it in some measure a thing arrived at together. I can see how that felt, from the inside, like the decent thing. It was nothing of the kind. A great British institution faced with a threat to free scholarship had one job: to solve the problem, not to canvass the frightened party about whether they minded being protected less. The museum holds the power, the resources, the British state somewhere behind it. We hold none of that. To invite us to co-sign the retreat was not respect. It was the transfer of a burden that was the museum’s to carry. The strong do not ask the weak to share the decision to fold.

The police failed second - though here I’ll be careful, because I don’t yet know what was asked of them or what they offered. But I know the pattern, because we have all watched it for two years. When the head of a Jewish charity was told by an officer that being “openly Jewish” near a demonstration was a provocation, the instinct was to locate the problem in the visible Jew rather than the menacing crowd. That is the tell: the conviction, dressed as operational good sense, that disruption is a kind of weather - a fact of nature to be managed - and that the reasonable thing is to ask whoever it is falling on to step out of the rain. The march is rerouted. The lecture is cancelled. The Jew, always, adjusts. Whether this is cowardice or exhaustion deserves its own letter, and will get one. For now I only note that nobody has said what it would have cost to police the room and remove the disruptors instead of the speaker.

The Board of Deputies failed third, and I will come to them in a separate letter, because the failure there is ours to put right and not yours.

And then there is you. You did not send the email or brief the officers. But you chair the trustees, and the buck on a thing like this stops at the chair. You were the one person in the building with the standing to say: no, not at my museum, this talk goes ahead and I will answer for it. To stand in front of the weak and take the blow - that was within your gift, and it was a single sentence. You did not need anyone’s permission to be brave. You only needed to be it.

I keep using that word - custodian - and I should say why, because it is the whole of my argument. My family did not inherit Britain. We were let in, and we knew it. My grandmother’s brother went to fight for this country and did not come back; she opened the door one day to receive his uniform with the bullet holes still in it, and she did not complain, then or ever, because you do not complain about the price of something you were glad to be allowed to buy. Every Saturday of my childhood I said the prayer for the Royal Family, and I say it still, because praying for the sovereign was never a contradiction of being a Jew. It was how we said thank you. We took the deal Britain offered, gladly, and we kept it.

So here is the thing I find I cannot stop turning over. I kept faith with the institutions. Did you? The Jew who prayed for the King every week of his life turns out to have a steadier grip on what the British Museum is for than the museum did. That is not a boast. It is a grief. I would so much rather it were not true.

Because I love this place, Mr Osborne. Our place. I love the British Museum the way I love the rule of law and the Shipping Forecast and the whole improbable apparatus of a country that defeated fascism and then went quietly off to build a health service. I am not asking you to defend the Jews. I am asking you to defend the museum - the plain, un-radical proposition that a scholar may stand in a British gallery and describe a British-held object without the permission of those who would rather he didn’t. The day that fails, it is not only the Jews who have lost something. It is everyone who ever thought this a country where you could say true things out loud.

The talk, I gather, will be rescheduled. Good. Then let me ask you for one thing, plainly, as one custodian to another.

Do not let it be quietly slipped back onto the calendar on some safer afternoon, with extra guards and a lowered profile, in the hope that nobody notices. Put Paul Collins back in that gallery. Stand in it yourself. Fill the room. Make it the most crowded, least apologetic hour the British Museum has hosted all year, and let the people who tried to stop it watch you fail to be stopped. Use all the power you have - and you have a great deal of it - to make a small thing happen in front of everyone. That is what the power is for.

Please.

Yours, in shared ownership of something worth keeping,

Ashley Hirst

cc. The British Museum