Boris Johnson’s government wants more patriotic cultural institutions

DAYS BEFORE he retired at the end of 2015, Neil MacGregor addressed colleagues and friends at the British Museum. As they raised their glasses, he quoted T.S. Eliot: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” A few years on, however, the commanding voice in museumland is not his successor as director of the British Museum, nor is it another grandee. It is the government.

In February the chairman of the Royal Museums Greenwich, a devoted Tory, resigned after ministers blocked the reappointment of a trustee, an academic who reportedly advocated “decolonising” the history curriculum and had liked Labour Party content on Twitter. In March a trustee of the Science Museum withdrew her application for a second term after she was asked to “explicitly express support” for the government’s policy on the removal of contentious historical objects. “Today it is contested heritage. Tomorrow it may be another issue,” she wrote.

The interference is part of an effort by ministers to reshape British institutions to the tastes of the new Tory electorate—patriotic and more working-class than before—by shifting power from the country’s cultural elite. After a year in which commercial revenue has crashed, museums are vulnerable to being leant on (even before the covid-19 pandemic, they...