Boris Johnson writing in the Daily Fail, no doubt from his latest holiday destination, has claimed that Keir Starmer’s reported decision to move the portrait of Margaret Thatcher at Downing St is ‘petty’. Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin had noted that he found the picture ‘unsettling’. That is a considerable understatement for those who spent the 1980s fighting the impact of Thatcher’s tour of destruction across Britain.
Perhaps Starmer, noted for a certain authoritarian tendency, might now go further and ban the public display of any depiction of Thatcher, either portraits or statues. Remembering her as social history in a museum is appropriate. Glorifying her in public is two fingers up to the working class communities she intentionally destroyed.
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