Saint Neil is his nickname. And we are blessed to have him. The British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, is far more than just the highly successful administrator of an iconic national establishment. He is a committed idealist who, in a world in which culture is increasingly presented as the acceptable face of politics, has pioneered a broader, more open, more peaceable way forward.

This year we almost lost him. He was being courted to replace Philippe de Montebello as the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It was easy to see why the Americans would covet him. Here was a man who had managed – by what often felt like charm and enthusiasm alone – to turn a financial basket case back into a cultural jewel.

When he took up his post in 2002, the British Museum was £5 million in deficit. Morale was at rock bottom. Visitor numbers had plummeted. A third of the galleries were closed and the staff that had not yet been sacked were on strike. Six years later, under MacGregor’s auspices, it has six million visitors a year and heads the list of our cultural attractions, trumping even Blackpool’s time-honoured mass-market mecca, the Pleasure Beach.

Who wouldn’t value a man who could convince the masses that carved lumps of old rock are more worth visiting than the Pepsi Max Big One? But MacGregor stayed in Britain. He declined the Met on principle. It was not a public institution, he said. And he wanted to stay at a museum that was free to everyone. MacGregor, it would appear, is profoundly democratic. Refocusing upon the founding ideals of the institution that was established by Act of Parliament in 1753 as a museum for the world, he has radically redefined the role that it can play in public life.

By emphasising the importance of an international community of inquiry, of a “republic of letters” as it would have been called in its Enlightment roots, he has helped to create a global society that is quite separate from others that constantly get caught up in the squabblings of government and politics.

Through this society he has managed, over the years, to create important cultural links with countries – including, perhaps most notably, China, Iraq and Iran – that have not enjoyed the warmest of political relations with the West.

With shows such asThe First Emperor in which he negotiated the largest loan of the terracotta soldiers from their Sha’anxi mausoleum, he not only brought us some of the world’s most spectacular objects but showed us that these objects were about far more than mere craftsmanship or beauty. They showed us an historical perspective with which we have to engage if we are to understand the modern-day Chinese.

Take the issue of political liberty in China, for example. The First Emperor exhibition was all about the control of the State and that State’s acute sense of its own indivisibility.

This idea of oneness, MacGregor emphasised, persisted against all the odds. And when we see how important and enduring this particular aspect of Chinese culture is it makes it much easier to understand things from the Chinese point of view.

Helping to release the power that lies implicit in the world’s ancient artefacts, MacGregor has turned the British Museum into an arena in which some of our most fraught and contentious contemporary political debates can be approached with a freshened sensitivity and depth of understanding that can surely be a great help in fostering peace.

MacGregor was born in 1946 into a Glaswegian family in which, by tradition, there were only three professions – medicine, the law and the Church. He studied languages at New College, Oxford, and philosophy in Paris – he was out on the streets with his fellow students in 1968 – before settling to retrain for the Scottish Bar.

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