Protecting Churchill is to miss the point, writes Tessa Dunlop
23 May 2025, 12:57 | Updated: 23 May 2025, 14:08
It will soon become a criminal offence to climb on Winston Churchill’s outsized statue.
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The iconic war-leader is being wedged into a piece of legislation currently going through Parliament which prohibits the scaling of certain national war memorials, including the Cenotaph and the Royal Artillery Memorial.
There is an irony in this doubling down on Churchill's sacred status. His sculptor, Ivor Roberts-Jones, did a fine job back in 1973, capturing the war leader's silhouette and gait: the stoop, the stick, the greatcoat. But a couple of decades after his unveiling, how many of us were still framing up Churchill as our go-to London backdrop?
Sir Anthony Seldon believes it is unlikely "many noticed the statue until people tried to desecrate it and put paint on it." Certainly my outstanding first memory of Parliament Square's Churchill was sporting a grass Mohican hairstyle, with red paint dribbling from his mouth. It was 2000 and anti-capitalist riots had swept the capital.
A former Marine, James Matthews, was convicted of 'intentionally or recklessly damaging' the statue. He apologised, explaining: "I thought that on a day when people all over the world were gathering to express their human rights and the right of freedom of speech, I would express a challenge to an icon of the British establishment."
Matthews was fined and imprisoned for a month.
The 2000 May Day riots put the statue on the map. Two years later and the nation overwhelmingly selected Churchill as the favourite in a BBC Greatest Britons competition. With his iconic status riding high, more iconoclasm was predictable.
Banksy cashed in with his 'Turf War' canvas of Churchill, again sporting a Mohican, and the statue has subsequently become the whipping boy for an increasingly divided nation; most notably during the 2020 Black Lives Matter campaign when the plinth was disfigured with a scrawled accusation: Churchill 'is a racist'. Cambridge University subsequently offered a new summer course: Winston Churchill: the greatest Briton? Reminding students that "the people's Winston is a mass of contradictions."
Countries need heroes. And when mob culture rails against them, it affords society the opportunity to re-evaluate the individual and the period. Churchill, the war leader, stands undiminished. He needs no new law to protect him. As for Churchill the man, he would probably have enjoyed the furore, it was Churchill the writer who noted in 1931:
"Just as eels are supposed to get used to skinning, so politicians get used to being caricatured…if we must confess it, they are quite offended and downcast when the cartoons stop…They fear old age and obsolescence are creeping upon them. They murmur 'we are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days are ended."
As The Times pertinently predicted in 1973: "the heroic statue…will become an emblem and a spectacle for generations not yet born." To bind the great man in too much state-sanctioned cotton wool is surely to miss the point of what Churchill really stood for.
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Dr Tessa Dunlop is an award-winning historian, broadcaster and author. Her most recent book Lest We Forget War and Peace in 100 British monuments is published by Harper North, other titles include Sunday Times best seller, The Century Girls, The Bletchley Girls and Elizabeth and Philip. Tessa has featured in numerous historical and royal documentaries and is co-host of the podcast Where Politics Meets History.
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