Twenty-five is no age to get Botox
I’m sure it must be a coincidence that, just weeks after the first statue of a woman was erected in Parliament Square, the only other memorial to a woman outside Westminster is to be moved.
In April, following a Telegraph campaign, a sculpture of suffrage leader Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in the square. For a few weeks, she stood cheek-by-jowl with the Emmeline Pankhurst monument in next-door Victoria Tower Gardens. Now a row has broken out over plans to relocate Pankhurst to Regent’s University in Regent’s Park; a place to which she had no connection.
A group calling itself The Pankhurst Trust – which has no links to the existing Pankhurst Trust or the Pankhurst family – has put forward the application. It was set up by former Tory MP Sir Neil Thorne, whose wife was reportedly walking through the gardens, saw the Emmeline memorial and thought it might be better off elsewhere. Thorne tried to move it to Parliament Square, but the Fawcett plan was already under way. His bonkers solution is to erect a new Pankhurst sculpture on nearby Canning Green (no, me neither), and shift the historical one.
Only 2.7 per cent of our nation’s statues are of non-royal women. As Emmeline’s great-granddaughter, Helen Pankhurst, told me: “There are many other suffrage campaigners and other important women who also need to be remembered.”
If Sir Neil (who is a member of a steering group associated with Regent’s University) wants to commission a new one, why not choose from the thousands of historically important women to whom no statue exists at all?