The UK government has today announced 16 new trustee appointments at the British Museum, Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The UK artist Isaac Julien has been appointed as a trustee of Tate, while the television presenter Claudia Winkleman, who studied History of Art at Cambridge University in the early 1990s, will join the British Museum board.
Author Tom Holland and former BBC Today programme presenter Martha Kearney will also become British Museum trustees. Tiffany Jenkins, the author of Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums and Why They Should Keep Them (2016), is also a new BM trustee.
The broadcaster June Sarpong and Nick Clarry, managing partner at CVC Capital Partners, will join the Tate's board. Jack Kirkland, another new Tate trustee, founded The Ampersand Foundation, a grant-giving arts charity, and is also a trustee of the Bridget Riley Art Foundation.
The TV presenter Vick Hope has been made a V&A trustee along with the journalist Mariella Frostrup. Nigel Newton, the chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing, also joins the V&A board, as does the businesswoman Akshata Murty, wife of the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.
Political declarations came from several appointees, including Murty, who declared that she has spoken on behalf of the Conservative Party and their candidates, canvassed on behalf of the party and helped at elections. Meanwhile Jack Kirkland declared that he has made a “recordable donation” to the Labour party. Daniel Finkelstein, a columnist atThe Times newspaper and now British Museum trustee, has been a Conservative Peer in the House of Lords since 2013.
The trustees’ tenure across all three institutions will last for four years beginning this month, with the exceptions of Tim Richards, founder and chief executive of Vue Entertainment and a new Tate trustee, who will begin his tenure in June.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirmed that trustees of the British Museum, Tate and V&A are not remunerated, but can claim “reasonable expenses which are properly and necessarily incurred on official business”.