Sometimes I worry I am actually conservative despite the “militant centrist mum” persona I present on LBC (and elsewhere). I love my country deeply. I want to protect the national parks, green belts, the coast, our rivers. I don’t want us to concrete over our green and pleasant land and want new housing to be environmentally sustainable and aesthetically pleasing. I pick up litter on walks and prefer to have the King as a national figurehead than a president.
I could go on. I have lived in the same house in London since 1993. I have been married to the same man for longer. I tutted out loud to read of Tate & Lyle dropping its trademark image of flies on carrion from tins of golden syrup (who doesn’t love the magnificent rotting lion?).
I buy and read print newspapers, and — this one is hard to believe, I know — I still watch the News at Ten, and then Newsnight as they go out. Yes, I suppose I like things to stay as they are.
This is my position on the plinth — let’s have a free vote please and then can everyone vote for Alexei Navalny?
And so I vow to thee my readers that I too huffed in irritation at Sadiq’s rebranding at the cost of a cool £6.3 million the six ginger squiggles of the Overground into the Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver and Windrush lines.
In fact, I picked a fight over half-term about this “Disney-fication” of history — according to Andrew Boff, the Tory member of the London Assembly — with my sister-in-law, who works for The Guardian.
“Suffragettes?” I hissed. “Woke box ticking! We already have a statue to Millicent Garrett Fawcett in Westminster and she was a suffragist not a suffragette,” I ranted, and pointed out that the Mayor’s office announced the line name with an image of Fawcett, who happens to be an ancestor of my mother, née Charlotte Fawcett.
I was on the point of suggesting that they should have named the lines after rivers in London not in Oxfordshire, but The Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman gave me one of her steely looks, and I needed no reminder of her historic role in exposing the Windrush scandal, so we turned the conversation into a joke about the Windrush line (they will kick you off it unless you can produce every single travelcard you’ve been issued with since birth, etc).
Which means she won, I lost, so now I’m supposed to be getting cross about the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square instead. This time, the charge against the Mayor is he’s promoting “anti-British propaganda” as he has produced “a multicultural shortlist” of sculptures and faced down calls for a statue of the late Queen to stand in the nation’s town square. According to my Daily Telegraph, “Offerings include a Bollywood-themed ice cream van, a golden bust of a woman’s head representing ‘a collective community portrait’ and a black woman in a revealing blue dress.” The good news? The Mayor has called for a consultation and competition that will be decided by a public vote.
Great! I’m not going to get worked up about this, even though public fury is obligatory these days. It is writ that one has to fling into outer darkness anyone who publicly or privately doesn’t share your opinions on everything from to Brexit to Megxit via Gaza and immigration. I’m not quite sure why this is, but am sure that Twitter, GB News, maybe the influence of YouTubers and smartphones has something to do with it. Everything has to be a culture war. Everyone has to pick a side.
So I’ve picked a side and this is my position on the plinth. Let’s have a free vote please, Sadiq. Can I want that in writing? Thank you.
And then, can everyone vote for a statue of Alexei Navalny, standing still, tall and proud and grinning and defiant after years behind bars, as a memento mori, and reminder of the sheer unlimited awfulness of Putin’s regime. But also, as a monument to the reality that never again is now, and it is here, too.
The world’s foreign ministers reacted to Navalny’s murder in prison as if such a terrible thing could never happen in their civilised countries, as if Russia was uniquely vicious in its treatment of irritants and insurgents.
Not so. The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been incarcerated since 2019 for the crime of being a journalist. He could this week be extradited to the US and certain death in a state penitentiary.
A Navalny-style tragedy is literally unfolding here, on British soil, in Belmarsh prison, as I write.
Vote Alexei Navalny for the plinth. Free Julian Assange. And do of course use the Overground with pride.
Rachel Johnson is a contributing editor of the Evening Standard
