It has become a ritual almost as traditional as the Changing of the Guard. During a weekend of mostly peaceful protests, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was once again vandalised.
The first recorded defacement of Ivor Roberts-Jones’ imposing rendition of Churchill took place during London’s 2000 May Day anti-capitalist protests. A strip of grass placed on the statue’s head gave the impression it sported a Mohican haircut. James Mitchell, a former soldier in his twenties, also sprayed its mouth with blood-like red paint. Mitchell said he did this because: ‘Churchill was an exponent of capitalism and of imperialism and anti-Semitism. A Tory reactionary vehemently opposed to the emancipation of women and to independence in India’. In a similar vein, this weekend an anonymous Black Lives Matters protestor sprayed on the statue’s plinth that Churchill was a racist.
As with previous defacements – and as tradition demanded – the reaction in the Conservative-leaning press was vituperative.
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