My futile morning guarding Churchill’s statue

On Armistice Day I made my way to Parliament Square with some vague notion of protecting Churchill’s statue. I’d discussed the need to stop it being defiled by pro-Palestinian protestors a few days earlier with a group I’m involved with called the British Friends of Israel, but in my head this had been a theoretical discussion, not something that involved me personally. Then Allison Pearson, a member of the group, announced in the Telegraph that she intended to stand in front of the statue armed with a rolled-up copy of the paper, and I felt shamed into joining her. Not that I was worried about her being knocked over by some thug in a Hamas headband. Rather, I didn’t want her to hog all the glory if a last-ditch defence proved necessary.

All the Tube lines that stop in Westminster – the Jubilee, Circle and District lines – were closed until 3 p.m., presumably to make it harder for any protestors to get there, although this wasn’t much of a deterrent. I got the Piccadilly line to Green Park and walked. It was a beautiful day and as I strolled through St James’s Park in my best suit with a couple of fellow patriots, one a veteran of the Royal Navy, I felt more like an extra in Mary Poppins than someone about to participate in a re-enactment of Rorke’s Drift. We paused halfway through to take some pictures of the pelicans.

When we arrived at the north-east corner of Parliament Square, the area in front of the statue was occupied by two groups, one made up of middle-aged intellectuals holding up pro-Israel banners, and the other of white working-class men who would later be described by the Guardian as ‘football hooligans’.