Another Banksy appeared this week, this time on the flank of the Grade I-listed Royal Courts of Justice in London. Naturally, the world’s news agencies leapt to attention. Not because of the image – a judge walloping a protester is the sort of wit you’d find on a novelty birthday card – but because the press can’t resist its favourite pantomime revolutionary. Within hours, it was boarded up and placed under guard. It was later scrubbed off the wall – a rare moment of good sense from the authorities. If only the same fate could befall the rest of Banksy’s wretched oeuvre.

If only the same fate could befall the rest of Banksy’s wretched oeuvre

The other day, walking around Bristol harbour, I was stopped by an elderly mittel-European couple – the husband carrying a moustache that seemed to have wandered out of a Stefan Zweig memoir. I braced myself to direct them to the SS Great Britain, or perhaps the Clifton Suspension Bridge. But no: what they wanted was Girl with a Pierced Eardrum – Banksy’s feeble “riff” on Vermeer, in which the pearl earring is replaced by a yellow burglar alarm. That, apparently, was the pilgrimage: to a tired gag sprayed onto a dockyard wall and vandalised within forty-eight hours of its unveiling.

Banksy’s scrawls draw visitors, not for the pictures themselves, I guess, but for........

© The Spectator