...as snowflake officials call for Churchill Room to be scrapped
CIVIL servants have complained to their superiors that they ‘do not feel comfortable’ with a room in the Treasury being named after Winston Churchill.
Reigniting attacks by Black Lives Matter protesters and Left-wing critics on Britain’s wartime hero, some staff at t he vast Whitehall department have demanded that its Churchill Room be confined to history.
It was named after the former Prime Minister because he used the room’s balcony to give an address to the crowds below on VE Day in 1945.
A number of junior officials raised t heir concerns during an of f i ci al Treasury equalities team question-andanswer event, sparking panic among senior mandarins.
The Mail on Sunday understands the issue has been raised all the way up to Treasury Permanent Secretary Tom Scholar, but has been met with derision by Ministers.
An insider said: ‘This has received a robust no from the politicians but there was a concerted effort to get it going.’
As Chancellor Rishi Sunak explained in a Treasury video released on the 75th anniversary of VE Day in May: ‘It is called the Churchill Room because it is the balcony where Winston Churchill stood and addressed the crowds.
‘He spoke to a sea of people stretching all the way down Whitehall and into Parliament Square.
‘After six years of horror, hardship and grief when so many sacrificed so much, people came together in a collective moment of joy and relief.’
And comparing the situation to the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Sunak added: ‘Today we are fighting a very different kind of battle but one thing is t he same: we will get t hrough this together.
‘As Churchill said from the balcony 75 years ago, “This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.” ’
The row comes after calls to tear down the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square that was defaced during unrest last month.
At t he t i me, Boris Johnson criti - ci s ed the calls as being the ‘ height of lunacy’.
The Prime Minister said he would resist any attempt to remove the statue ‘with every breath in my body’.
And he described his wartime predecessor as ‘ one of t he country’s greatest ever leaders’ adding he was ‘extremely dubious about the growing campaign to edit or photoshop the entire cultural landscape’.
The Treasury declined to comment.