King Charles isn’t the enemy of animal rights activists

The attack by animal rights activists on the new portrait of King Charles, currently on display at the Philip Mould gallery in London, is both depressing and predictable. It is depressing because it suggests that any work of art, whether historic or contemporary, is now fair game for a bunch of privileged, often spoilt young men and women who wish to draw attention to their pet bugbear in as infantile and ostentatious a fashion as possible. And it is predictable because, in this country and overseas, there have been so many similar occurrences recently. Just a week and a half ago, Monet’s Coquelicots was defaced by a climate activist at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay; another sign that this regrettable trend shows no signs of ceasing.

France’s culture minister Rachida Dati responded robustly to that particular outrage, saying: ‘This destruction of art by delinquents cannot be justified in any way.