To hear Nigel ‘It’s Just Not Done’ Biggar, a conservative British political priest who thinks the British Empire saved the world (the Zulus had another thought) tell it, Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin rescued the Parthenon Marbles too.

News flash. There’s no more Colonial rule and the British can’t steal any more treasures or artifacts from other countries to put in the British Museum that, without them, would have to display kidney pie and fish ‘n chips exhibits.

You could dismiss Biggar, one of the United Kingdom’s apologists for plunder, as another contrarian curmudgeon who apparently can’t get over the fact that British rule wasn’t beneficent (ask Cyprus and India too) but he used the blimpish The Spectator magazine as a soap box to perpetuate the myth Elgin was a hero for Greece.

Greece doesn’t need any lectures from a pious priest on the subject of architecture and culture, neither of which are in the bailiwick of the United Kingdom, and especially from someone with the word moral in his title.

He teaches Moral Philosophy at Oxford University and wrote a book called ‘In Defense of War’ but what he really means is ‘In Defense of British Colonialism’ and at Oxford initiated a project called Ethics and Empire, the British having neither.

That fusty manifesto properly brought a backlash from 170 real international academics that it was “attempting to balance out the violence committed in the name of empire with its supposed benefits.”

He didn’t submit it to peer scrutiny, of course, nor debate, but used The Times for an op-ed to hide from critics and argue that Colonialism – exploiting other people’s cultures since you don’t have one – was a moral quagmire, and that the British shouldn’t feel guilty about stealing other people’s stuff and countries.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a British basher (although no one ever said, “hey, let’s go get some English food) and there’s no bigger fan of John Steed and Emma Peel, let alone Michael Caine and Sherlock Holmes.

But Biggar is as far from real principled Brits as the British Army was from winning the Battle of Isandlwana and his smug sanctimony reeks of someone who has no real moral compass and couldn’t find morality with a compass or a GPS.

He’s piling on the indignities against Greece, which has rightly asserted that Elgin – who wanted the marbles for his home before selling them to the British Museum over a messy divorce – stole them.

Generally speaking, if you hack something off someone else’s wall and ship it to your homeland that’s considered stealing, but the British were practiced in that, so they took to calling it ‘rescuing other countries’ treasures’.

That presumes the British knew better than the Greeks, who sculpted a wonder of the world, what to do with the marbles, but stored them in a stuffy, dark wing of a leaky museum and away from the sun. But you have to remember you’re talking about a peoples who think the piled rocks of Stonehenge are an architectural miracle although they look like the monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

Without all the stolen artifacts from former colonies and other countries the British Museum would scramble to find some of those funny white wigs that British judges and lawyers use to try to pretend there’s dignity and solemnity in their courtrooms.

“Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he rescued them. The argument that the Marbles should be returned to Greece because they represent ‘the essence of Greekness’ is nationalist nonsense,” he wrote, presumably not under the influence of Gordon’s gin.

Greece’s late, great actress and former Culture Minister Melina Mercouri – you could have sold tickets to see her take Biggar apart in a debate – renamed the treasures the Parthenon Marbles to take away the stain of Elgin’s name on them.

Biggar tried to argue that because Greece had slaves during the building of the Parthenon that it wasn’t a real democracy and that it then was “far more like England’s own Medieval Parliament than today’s democratic one.”

It was Greece, of course – not Britain – that gave the world democracy, so let’s stop that lecture as what he was really doing was posturing to prop up the specious repeated offer of the British Museum to only loan Greece its own marbles.

That deal smells worse than the phishing emails promising you a fortune in lost money in your name if only you’ll first wire $5,000 to a bank in Nigeria. It would require Greece to give up ownership of the marbles AND send the museum other treasures to be held hostage.

That’s not going to happen and if it did you’d need riot police and the military to protect the then-Greek Prime Minister who would order the Parthenon Marbles that would only temporarily be housed in the Acropolis Museum to be sent back to London.

Biggar said Elgin had permission from the then-ruling Ottoman Empire in 1801 to take the marbles, but today’s Turkish government said there’s no record, the British Museum having one written in Italian, not Turkish, so go figure.

“The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning. They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks,” he said, arguing they belong in the British Museum to provoke “fresh insight into human cultures.”

But they mean nothing to him.