TALK about shooting yourself in the political foot. By now we should all be accustomed to the crass incompetency of the UK Government’s inability to read the runes.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s migration policies, the response to Covid or backpedalling on climate pledges, almost everything this government touches ends up an unmitigated mess. Cue Rishi Sunak and the Parthenon sculptures or as they are otherwise known, the Elgin Marbles, the so-called jewel in the crown of the British Museum.

Even by Sunak’s usual standards for petulant and childish responses to issues or individuals that irk him, his cancelling of a meeting with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis after he restated Greece’s claim to the Parthenon sculptures, ranks among the most unnecessary and puerile of diplomatic faux pas.

It’s not that Sunak simply has an unerring gift for failing to win friends and influence people, but his snub of Mitsotakis also says so much about the Britain we currently have to live in.

As someone who in a past life before journalism was an art historian who taught at Glasgow School of Art and used to run a student module on museum services, I’m perhaps a little more familiar than most with the role images and material objects play in constructing identities, communities, empires and nations.

I understand too how institutions like the British Museum are seen by many as “untouchable” given that they help reinforce the kind of “Britishness” beloved of so many right now in government.

READ MORE: Scottish independence poll: 54% back Yes in new Ipsos survey

I’m talking about the Britain of Brexit, of “One Britain, One Nation”. It’s the “Global Britain” that Boris Johnson wanted wrapped in the Union flag for us to rally round while busy sending gunboats to Gibraltar to teach the Spanish a lesson or aircraft carriers to the South China Sea to keep Beijing in line.

It’s a Britain now shaped by a political culture in which the Government rides roughshod over our international treaties and obligations and a place where increasingly a state-approved version of history is the order of the day.

In the creation of this mythical Britain, even the appropriation of art has its role to play, becoming a political tool cynically deployed to underscore why Britain is still “Great”.

To be fair the use of art in this capacity is nothing new. Few former colonialist countries are innocent of plundering and the thieving of other nations’ artefacts.

And yes, I know the trustees of the British Museum say that they legally own the Parthenon sculptures and that they cannot be permanently returned to Greece because of the museum’s “legal and moral responsibility to preserve and maintain all the collections in their care and to make them accessible to world audiences.”

But this insistence of doing good by such artefacts often hides another truth both in Britain and in other former colonialist countries.

In his home country of France for example, the late Andre Malraux, former minister of cultural affairs in President Charles de Gaulle’s administration in the late 50s and 60s was an avowed anti-colonialist, but was still caught red-handed trying to smuggle artefacts out of Cambodia’s ancient temples in 1921.

But Britain especially was a rapacious looter such as when its colonial troops invaded Benin City, the kingdom’s wealthy capital in West Africa in 1897, and stripped it of thousands of antiquities.

Many, known as the Benin Bronzes, ended up with Queen Victoria or were kept by British soldiers for themselves or sold on for profit in West Africa, England and elsewhere.

Many too ended up in the halls and storerooms of museums around the world, including Britain.

It's an inescapable fact that to this day such artefacts remain the cultural plunder that some in former imperialistic or colonialist countries continue to flaunt in the face of others to remind them who called the shots in a bygone age and are still a power to be reckoned with.

That such thinking is outdated and reprehensible goes without saying, but as Sunak’s arrogance revealed this week, it’s still very much around.

The Greek leader after all is of a centre-right disposition and represents a European democracy and Nato member. Think too of the missed diplomatic opportunities squandered by not having such a meeting with discussions on asylum seekers and other pressing European issues.

READ MORE: Nigel Farage uses 'homophobic racial slur' in uncovered Cameo

To his credit, Mitsotakis rather magnanimously later insisted that Sunak’s move would “not hurt relations between Greece and Britain in the longer term.”

Which takes me back to the question as to why Sunak risked getting the Greek leader’s back up over some 2500-year-old sculptures over which Britain and Greece have been at loggerheads almost since the day they were removed from the Acropolis by agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin at the start of the 19th century.

As one senior European official was quoted in the press as saying:

“If you want to be global Britain, open to the world, based on international values and diplomacy, you don’t just stop talking with friends because of an issue that has been around for 200 years. Not engaging is a problem.”

Frankly, I believe that only by viewing Sunak’s rebuff of Mitsotakis through a prism of British nationalism and how it was meant to play out with its supporters here in the UK is the only real explanation for Sunak’s crass behaviour.

Unless of course that is, Sunak was smarting too from the fact that the Greek prime minister chose also to meet Sir Keir Starmer.

But it’s hardly Mitsotakis’s fault if he wants to get to know the man polls suggest could be the next UK prime minister.

As it stands, and as current Tory government misdemeanours go, many will see the Parthenon sculptures rebuff as small beer.

At the very least it was certainly an unedifying response from Sunak. But more telling perhaps, it was also a barbed reminder of the arrogance that underpins the deeply misguided notion that Britain is still the power in the world that it once was.