It went missing 40 years and could be on the way back. But should the controversial sword of George Square be allowed to return, asks Mark Smith

One of the biggest problems apparently was the bird poo, but look at him now. In a corner of a workshop on an industrial estate near London, a Scottish war hero is looking very fine indeed in his cape and his buttons and his sideburns. Check out his hand though. Sir John Moore, late of the Peninsular War, born in Glasgow, has been scrubbed and sanded and shone and is almost ready to head home. But he’s not finished yet because his left hand is empty. Something’s missing, and a decision needs to be made about what happens next.

The missing item in question is a sword, the one the statue of Moore held in his hand from 1819 until some time in the 1980s when it disappeared. No one knows exactly what happened, but the best guess is that some lad full of lager swiped the sword for a laugh one night and that was it, it’s been missing ever since. Moore, and ten other statues from George Square, are in the workshop in Hertfordshire being renovated and made ready for their return, and a new sword has been remodelled and built. But you know what statues are like these days. It’s not straightforward. People get worked up. There’s controversy.

The controversy has been rumbling for a number of years now since the zenith of Black Lives Matter in 2020 when the statue of Edward Colston was thrown into a river in Bristol. The objection is usually that the men on the plinths (they’re almost always men on the plinths) were involved in the slave trade in some way or part of violent military actions from the days of........

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