The British Museum has quietly stamped out its long-running tobacco sponsorship deal — a partnership that always sat awkwardly in its portfolio of advertisers. After 15 years of taking money from Japan Tobacco International, maker of Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut, Camel, Winston, and the rest of the carcinogenic pantheon, the Museum has let its contract lapse. It officially expired in September.
Noticeably, the institution scrubbed JTI’s name from its website in the last few weeks, and you can draw your own conclusions about the choreography of that decision. A new report from the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath described the sponsorship as a neat cog in JTI’s broader lobbying machine. Museums love to talk about transparency; this one arrived like someone flashing their headlights.
According to the Museum, the trustees made the decision independently — no nudges, no winks, no late-night government phone calls. The Times’ coverage suggests otherwise, hinting that conversations between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport had already raised red flags. The DHSC reportedly warned that the arrangement might breach the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which bars signatory states (including the UK) from accepting tobacco-linked advertising or sponsorship in any form.
Cue the back-and-forth. DCMS insists the government had nothing to do with it — “categorically untrue,” in the kind of tone bureaucracies deploy when they’d rather you didn’t look too closely. They pointed the finger back: public bodies already know the rules, sponsorship from the tobacco industry is basically radioactive, and the British Museum reached its conclusion entirely on its own steam. And perhaps it did. But the choreography is messy, and you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to sense a little smoke drifting around the edges.
Public health advocates, meanwhile, aren’t mourning the break-up. Nicholas Hopkinson — professor at Imperial College London and chair of Action on Smoking and Health — called it a “positive step,” which is polite academic shorthand for what took you so long? Culture Unstained, the campaign group that has long pushed for museums to sever ties with ethically dubious funders, welcomed the shift too.
Of course, the relationship wasn’t just a logo in the corner of a press release. JTI money supported the Museum’s Acquisition Fund, helping secure more than 2,400 objects for the collection. It paid for a specialist curatorial post in Japanese material, currently held by Alfred Haft. It also pumped funds into the Community Partnership Programme — touch tours for blind visitors, sign-language tours, LGBTQ tours, tea parties for older people, and training around equality and access. In other words, tobacco money helped fund some of the Museum’s most outward-facing, socially minded work. That contradiction was always at the heart of the debate: good projects, awkward patron.
The Museum, doing its best to sound grateful without appearing defensive, issued a neat statement on mixed funding models, public duty, and long-term stability. Fair enough. Every cultural institution in the country is scrambling to patch together budgets as public funding shrinks to threads. But this particular revenue stream was always going to blow up sooner or later.
The Royal Academy now stands out as the last major visual arts institution still happily accepting JTI’s corporate membership, Premier Level no less. The RA doesn’t receive government subsidy, and its justification is straightforward: we need the money; we take it where we can. It’s a pragmatic stance, though increasingly lonely. Tate cut tobacco sponsorship back in 1991, with minutes from the time revealing a blunt principle: no money from companies that sell cigarettes.
The broader conversation is only growing sharper. The Museums Association has just approved new guidelines urging institutions to steer clear of sponsors linked to environmental harm, human rights abuses, or anything else that chafes against a museum’s supposed values. Fossil fuels, tobacco, all the usual suspects — the list is getting longer, not shorter.
The British Museum, now with a new director, is trying to walk forward with cleaner hands — or at least cleaner pockets — and in today’s climate, that alone feels like a cultural weather shift.