British Museum gave Peter Thiel private Bayeux viewing — SkimNews
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- The British Museum privately hosted Peter Thiel for a VIP viewing of the Bayeux tapestry on 18 August, arranged by director of development Charlotte Appleyard while the exhibition gallery is still under construction.
- Senior museum leaders were warned about the public perception of giving special treatment to someone with Jeffrey Epstein connections and whose company Palantir holds controversial UK state contracts, but the viewing still went ahead.
- Museum chair George Osborne was aware of the viewing but did not attend with Thiel; the museum says no light hours were taken from the public allocation and Thiel is not a donor.
- Members of the public faced online queues of up to nine hours when tickets first went on sale earlier this summer, with reports of 80,000 people queueing by mid-afternoon and the next public release scheduled for 21 October at 10am.
- One Aldwych hotel guests, where rooms cost more than £1,000 a night, can also bypass the online queues entirely for tapestry tickets.
- Palantir, Thiel's company, holds a £330m NHS contract since 2023 that a cross-party parliamentary committee urged Labour to scrap last month citing "serious mistrust," while London mayor Sadiq Khan separately blocked a £50m Met Police contract that Palantir is now challenging in the high court.
Why it matters: The museum's defence that no public light hours were diverted and that Thiel is not a donor does not address the core optics: a public institution handed privileged access to a controversial billionaire with Epstein ties and a company facing political scrutiny over NHS data, on the same artefact for which 80,000 members of the public queued online for up to nine hours.
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