Thatcher statue plan upset by vandal fears

PROPOSALS FOR a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square, across the road from the House of Commons, look set to be rejected because of fears it will be vandalised.

Westminster Council also says there are too many other statues in the square, which it calls a “monument saturation zone”.

The square accommodates 11 statues, with a 12th under construction. They include Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln.

A document prepared for a council meeting next Tuesday says new statues are not permitted unless there is an “exceptionally good reason”.

Officials have put in place a “ten-year rule” which states that statues should not be erected until a decade after the subject’s death to “allow partisan passions to cool and enable sober reflection”. It also identifies concerns over potential civil disobedience and vandalism, given the former Prime Minister’s divisive legacy. Theresa May said in July that such concerns should not prevent the statue – designed by sculptor Douglas Jennings showing the Iron Lady in a “resolute posture” – from being erected. In 2002, a protester decapitated a £150,000 Italian marble statue of Lady Thatcher at London’s Guildhall Library. At the unveiling of her bronze statue outside the House of Commons chamber in 2007, Baroness Thatcher said: “I might have preferred iron, but bronze will do.”