Henry Wellcome’s critics are right to say that, over the course of his life, he amassed enormous wealth, power and privilege. He may even have exploited the communities from which he took the objects for his collection. But people, like the past, are rarely simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

In his lifetime, Wellcome’s company mass produced insulin and created a vaccine for diphtheria. He founded what is still Britain’s biggest charity, with £36 billion in assets used to finance medical research. Wellcome was long gone when his investments funded the first drugs for leukaemia and HIV.

Given all this, the sight of people whose wages are paid from Wellcome’s continued legacy denouncing him for having ‘the privilege of a wealthy white man in the Victorian era’ is appalling. These people are not only ignorant and narcissistic, they are also depriving future generations of the wealth of knowledge that was Wellcome’s gift to the world.

The Wellcome Collection’s curators are happy to take their founder’s money but contemptuous of his legacy. They are not preservers of the past, but cultural vandals intent on destroying humanity’s shared history. When museums become just another site for woke hectoring and identitarian grievance-mongering, we will all be asking: what’s the point?