Director’s cut

In the spring of 2008 I went on a press trip with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, to Hadrian’s wall. It was one of a series of jaunts planned by the BM in the run-up to its great Hadrian exhibition, a little Roman holiday. But though the wall was fascinating, I spent most of my time inspecting the director. He’s charming and universally admired — but also enigmatic. What are his politics? What does he do for fun? Nobody seems to know.

So I watched him at Segedunum in Newcastle, talking to local grandees, charming, mercurial, alert. I watched him out by Housesteads fort, chatting to the curators. On the way back, in the minibus, I peered at him from my seat beside the editor of British Archaeology, admiring the way he can gossip as easily about 4th-century Rome as about 21st-century London. But I left knowing less than ever about him.

Two years later, listening to MacGregor on BBC Radio 4 telling A History of the World in 100 Objects, it occurred to me that his mysterious private life makes him ideal for the BM: he can tell the story of an object without his own intervening. A few weeks after that, walking through the October rain and the half-enticing smell of hot-dog onions to meet him again, it struck me that everything about MacGregor’s life prior to the BM seems to have been preparing him for this job. He has a passion for the Enlightenment, for raising the consciousness of mankind; he’s a gifted teacher — crucial for an institution that was set up as a kind of Open University; he’s a fund-raiser par excellence (the Sainsburys have just given £25 million to the BM). It’s almost creepy when you think about it: as if the objects in the museum — the emperors, ankhs, scimitars and sphinxes — pooled their ancient powers and summoned up Neil to represent them to the world.