Beset by colonial controversy, difficult finances and the discovery of a thief on the inside, Britain’s No 1 museum is in deep trouble. Can it restore its reputation?

The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.

It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, at least 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year. Add together everything owned by the Louvre, the National Gallery and the V&A, and you still have fewer than half the objects possessed by the British Museum.