Sir Keir Starmer’s government looks ready to smile upon the British Museum’s apparent desire to by-pass the legal prohibition of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens by negotiating a ‘long-term loan’ instead. Since Greece believes that the Marbles were stolen, that ‘loan’ is bound to be permanent.

The first hint of this came four days after the general election, when Dennis McShane, Labour’s Europe minister from 2002 to 2005, published an article in the Times on 8 July: ‘It would be smart politics to return Elgin Marbles now’.