MAGGIE STATUE PLAN BLOCKED
Iron Lady tribute outside Commons ‘may be vandal target’
PLANS for a statue of Margaret Thatcher outside the Commons have been blocked amid fears it could be vandalised.
Campaigners had hoped to install a ten-foot bronze of Britain’s first woman prime minister in Parliament Square.
But a formal objection has been lodged by the Royal Parks quango, which owns the land on which it would have been erected.
Officials said they would not back the proposal because the £300,000 statue has not received the support of Baroness Thatcher’s family. It also emerged last night that a residents’ association has objected on the grounds that the former Tory leader was ‘controversial enough to risk vandalism’.
The Iron Lady is still a hate figure for the hard-Left some 27 years after she was forced out of Downing Street. Activists even threatened to disrupt her funeral after her death in 2013. The proposed site of the bronze figure is near the statue of Winston Churchill, which was targeted during a May Day protest in 2000 when a piece of turf was left on his head in the style of a Mohican.
In 2002 a £150,000 marble statue of Lady Thatcher was decapitated at an art gallery in central London. Last night Tory MPs said it was ‘appalling’ that Britain could not commemorate its first female prime minister because of the threat posed by the hard-Left.
Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘Blocking it for fear of thugs and vandals is the lily- livered approach that Lady Thatcher most disdained.’ Boris Johnson has in the past
spoken out in favour of a memorial to the former PM in Parliament Square. However, Baroness Thatcher’s daughter Carol has expressed unhappiness with the proposed design, complaining she was disappointed it did not include her handbag.
The statue is the brainchild of the Public Memorials Appeal charity, which submitted an application to Westminster City Council. It depicts Britain’s first female PM in ‘a resolute posture looking towards Parliament with a stern gaze’, their submission claims.
But council papers reveal that an objection has been lodged by Royal Parks, which owns the small strip of land proposed for the figure.
There are also fears within Whitehall that Left-wing mobs will repeatedly target the statue and try to damage it.
A Royal Parks spokesman said last night: ‘ Numerous times we have requested assurances from the applicant that they have approval from the family for the statue. To date we have not had those assurances.’
The Thorney Island Society, the residents’ association for the area, also objected to the plans on the grounds of vandalism. Committee member Lucy Peck said they wanted a ‘ten-year gap between the death of a subject and the erection of a public memorial’. She added: ‘We note that the statue of Nelson Mandela was erected only six years after his death, but that should not set a precedent, especially as Mandela was an entirely uncontroversial figure, respected throughout the world.
‘While Lady Thatcher was also widely respected it cannot be said that she was uncontroversial in this country.
‘There is a strong case for the ten-year rule to be respected: there should be a decent interval before permanent statues are erected, especially when they are
‘Respected but not uncontroversial’
controversial enough to risk vandalism.’ There is already a 7ft 4in bronze statue of the former Tory leader inside Parliament, in the Commons Members’ Lobby, which was unveiled in 2007.
Last year it emerged that the man championing the Parliament Square memorial had branded Carol and Mark Thatcher ‘philistines’ for opposing the design by sculptor Douglas Jennings.
Ivan Saxton, chairman of the Public Memorials Appeal charity, wrote in a letter to Boris Johnson when he was London mayor: ‘Carol Thatcher is a philistine in the truest sense of the word because she does not recognise a wonderful work of art when she sees one. She is obsessed by a fantasy image of her mother as being the Iron Lady.
‘Normally the family of a person who is being sculpted show a high degree of gratitude towards those people who have made a statue possible. But not the Thatcher twins: it appears that they don’t know the meaning of the word gratitude. It’s like spitting into the faces of the all those people who have donated time and money. Their mother would have been ashamed.’
Sir Edward Lister, Mr Johnson’s deputy mayor at the time, said: ‘This is not about handbags, it is about depicting Baroness Thatcher at the pinnacle of her career’. Tom Crum of Fine Architecture – which submitted plans for the statue – has said the Parliament Square statue of Churchill ‘does not have his cigar and only one of the existing statues of Lady Thatcher has a handbag’.
The figure would have stood on a stone plinth on the west side of Parliament Square on Canning Green between the statues of Abraham Lincoln and former British PM George Canning.
Royal Parks said its chief executive had discussed the issue with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
It was announced in April that suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett would be the first woman honoured with a statue in Parliament Square. All 11 figures currently in that location are men.