"If I told you [to] cut the Mona Lisa in half... do you think your viewers would appreciate the beauty of the painting?"Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis says returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece is about "reunification" not "ownership" on the Laura Kuenssberg show
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00:00 viewers, many of them will have heard of the Elgin marbles or the Parthenon sculptures
00:04 that you call them the Parthenon sculptures because they were brought to this country
00:08 in the 19th century by Lord Elgin, who was a British diplomat at the time. Now, here
00:13 are the ones in the British Museum. There they are in their home in Athens. So at the
00:17 moment they're not together. You've said for a long time, Greece has said for a long time
00:21 that they would very much like to have them back. Now, where do you think they look better?
00:27 I think the answer is very clear. They do look better in the Acropolis Museum, a state-of-the-art
00:32 museum that was built for that purpose. And again, this is not a question of returning
00:38 artifacts whose ownership we question. We feel that these sculptures belong to Greece
00:44 and that they were essentially stolen. But this is not, in my mind, an ownership question.
00:48 This is a reunification argument. Where can you best appreciate what is essentially one
00:54 monument? I mean, it's as if I told you that you would cut the Mona Lisa in half and you
01:00 would have half of it at the Louvre and half of it at the British Museum. Do you think
01:03 your viewers would appreciate the beauty of the painting in such a way? Well, this is
01:08 exactly what happened with the Parthenon sculptures. And that is why we keep lobbying for a deal
01:15 that would essentially be a partnership between Greece and the British Museum, but which would
01:21 allow us to return the sculptures to Greece and have people appreciate them in their original
01:29 setting. Now, you said you were confident if you were re-elected, you have been re-elected,
01:33 that the marbles would return to Greece. So are you confident now that there will be a
01:36 deal? You've got a hotline to George Osborne, the boss of the British Museum. What I can
01:39 tell you is that I would hope that we have not made as much progress as I would like
01:45 in the negotiations. But again, I'm a patient man and we've waited for hundreds of years
01:53 and I will persist in these discussions. Do you think you'll be able to do it on your
01:58 time frame? I would hope so. Yes, I was just elected. I still have a full term ahead of
02:04 me. It's sort of unusual in these days in Europe for prime ministers to be rewarded
02:08 for the job they do. But I think we've done that. We've turned the country around. The
02:12 economy is performing particularly well. We're growing much faster. I was following the previous
02:17 debate about taxes and about the burden on average people. We've lowered taxes but we've
02:23 also driven up growth. So in our case, we can convincingly say that the difficult days
02:29 for Greece are behind us.
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