Losing Sunak’s marbles We are a month away from Christmas, but the silly season – at least in politics – appears to have arrived early in the UK, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has picked a fight with his Greek counterpart because he is afraid of losing his marbles – the Elgin Marbles, also known as the Parthenon sculptures – to be precise. Sunak pressed the diplomatic nuclear button earlier this week – cancelling a planned meeting with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London on Tuesday, claiming that Mitsotakis had reneged on a promise not to use the trip as an opportunity to demand the return of the Parthenon sculptures or to the UK, the Elgin Marbles. In a BBC interview at the weekend, Mitsotakis had compared the relocation of the sculptures to the Mona Lisa being cut in half. The meeting was cancelled when Mitsotakis chose “to grandstand and relitigate issues of the past”, said Sunak, firing the first shots in a war of words between London and Athens that continued for the rest of the week. The two sides disputed the history of the sculptures, particularly how they were removed from the Acropolis in the early 19th century by Thomas Elgin and sold to the British government. Less open to debate is that their continued presence in the British Museum in central London, when they could safely be returned home to Athens, is hard to justify. Cultural history is important, but this is still a bizarre fight for Sunak to have picked. For one thing, the resting place of the sculptures is none of his business, as the British Museum has been in talks with Greek officials on the matter for years. The decision on whether to send them home on loan, as UK law currently prevents them from being returned permanently, is solely for the museum’s trustees. For another, the UK is still painfully short of international allies in Europe and elsewhere. David Cameron’s political career was given a second life as foreign secretary a few weeks ago precisely to build bridges and boost London’s diplomatic clout. Instead, one of Cameron’s first acts was to try – unsuccessfully – to make peace with Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis on the sidelines of this week’s NATO summit. The agenda of the cancelled Sunak-Mitsotakis meeting included the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, immigration, and the climate emergency. Staring down the barrel of a 20+ point opinion poll deficit ahead of an election likely to be held in the next year, Sunak may have thought that a bit of EU-bashing would buy him a couple of days of patriotic coverage in the UK tabloids and with his Conservative party. But it hasn’t worked out that way: he just looked petulant. | 