23 May 2025, 12:57 | Updated: 23 May 2025, 14:08

By Tessa Dunlop

It will soon become a criminal offence to climb on Winston Churchill’s outsized statue.

The iconic war-leader is being wedged into a piece of legislation currently going through Parliament which prohibits the scaling of certain national war memorials, including the Cenotaph and the Royal Artillery Memorial.

There is an irony in this doubling down on Churchill's sacred status. His sculptor, Ivor Roberts-Jones, did a fine job back in 1973, capturing the war leader's silhouette and gait: the stoop, the stick, the greatcoat. But a couple of decades after his unveiling, how many of us were still framing up Churchill as our go-to London backdrop?

Sir Anthony Seldon believes it is unlikely "many noticed the statue until people tried to desecrate it and put paint on it." Certainly my outstanding first memory of Parliament Square's Churchill was sporting a grass Mohican hairstyle, with red paint dribbling from his mouth. It was 2000 and anti-capitalist riots had swept the........

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