The British Museum thefts have exposed a deeper problem

It's not just security or cataloguing the next director will have to worry about what the institution needs is a culture change -

- Nancy Durrant

IT has been an ignominious couple of weeks at the British Museum, where the scandal over the alleged theft of potentially thousands of objects from the collection stores has already claimed two jobs.

A senior curator, Peter Higgs, has been fired, and having announced on July 28 that he would be leaving his post next year, the museum's director, Hartwig Fischer, hastily amended that last week to say that his presence was "proving a distraction" and that he would step down as soon as a temporary replacement could be found.

After the story was revealed by Ittai Gradel, the art historian who had alerted the museum to the losses some two years ago but had been fobbed off by senior leaders, the museum's chair of trustees, George Osborne, referred in an interview to "potential group think" at the museum "that couldn't believe a member of staff was doing this".

I think this is the key to what's gone wrong. This was, apparently, a scandal waiting to happen; a grievous and utterly avoidable failure of processes that could have been spotted a mile off. Speaking this week, a former curator at the museum described a shoddy system, where stores are "alarmed but not otherwise monitored".

"I would call up security, tell them which room I was entering, get the key and that's all I needed to do to have access to a huge range of objects," she said. "Many of the collections are stored. in the same rooms as others, so if a person were dishonest they would have the cover of knowing that scores of other curators, conservators, specialists and researchers would have been in that room in the same week or even day."