Like many others I was appalled and disgusted to see the various desecrations and damage done to various statues of historical figures such as those of Winston Churchill in London and the removal by a violent left wing mob of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and the subsequent perverse jury verdict on the vandals. I also boiled with anger at the BLM/Marxists vandalism of the Cenotaph, the monument to Britain’s war dead.

If I am not to be called a hypocrite I have to have an equal and equally appalled attitude to the arsehole who climbed a ladder and damaged the statue of Prospero and Ariel that sits atop the old entrance hall of Broadcasting House. This was disgraceful Taliban like behaviour and I welcome the arrest and remand in custody of the vandal concerned.

Whilst like any other sensible person I was appalled by the revelations about the personal life of the sculptor Eric Gill who created the sculptures on Broadcasting House and who died in 1940, which came out when his diaries were published in the late 1980’s. Without a shadow of a doubt, Gill was an abuser but I doubt very much that Gill’s abusive tendencies were widely known when the sculptures were commissioned. They were put in place during the BBC Director Generalship of Lord John Reith. I very much doubt that Gill would have been commissioned to produce these statues if there was wide knowledge of Gill’s dodgy sexual proclivities at the time. This was because Lord Reith was a committed churchman and a champion of good public morals. If there is anything to criticise Reith for in the thirties then it would be his flirtation with fascism and keeping anti-Appeasement politicians such as Churchill off the air. The flirtation with fascism today looks pretty bad but back then a lot of people flirted with fascism just as others flirted with Communism. Nobody at that time knew or realised just how bad these two authoritarian ideologies could be.

The sculpture of Prospero and Ariel which the moronic Tosspot Taliban vandalised yesterday was absolutely nothing to do with paedophilia or child abuse. It is a reference to characters in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Tempest’ and the sculpture is all about Prospero setting Ariel free. If someone is foolish enough to believe that this sculpture is all about noncing then maybe it is those who think this sort of thing who should have their hard drives checked?

To try to smash up a sculpture or damage any other sort of artwork because you dislike the character or politics of the artist is no different from the sort of cancellation by violence that we have seen from elements on the far Left. It is really the sort of behaviour that you get from political or religious extremists. In fact when I saw the idiot with his hammer I could not help but think of the behaviour of the Taliban when they destroyed the Bamiyan Buddahs in Afghanistan because these images offended their particular take on Islam. The sort of vandalism that we saw at Broadcasting House comes from a similar place to similar acts of wanton destruction, a very dark place indeed I need to say. It comes from the same dark place as the bookburners of Germany prior to World War II, the people who denounced their neighbours as counter-revolutionaries to Stalin in the Soviet Union and the Catholic religious authorities who murdered Protestants during the reign of Bloody Mary or the Jewish ones who attempted to silence the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

If the vandal who attacked the statue of Prospero and Ariel is not sufficiently punished then where will it all end up? Will we have demands for the paintings of Caravaggio to be removed or destroyed because the artist was a brawling murderer? Or will we have angry mobs demanding that Sir Stanley Spencer’s magnificent ‘Resurrection at Cookham’ be destroyed because of that artist’s convoluted private life. Will there be angry mobs ransacking the tomb of Henry VIII on the grounds that he wasn’t that good to his wives? Temperance activists vandalising Churchill’s monument on the grounds that Churchill was a drunk?

What about writers? Shall we throw the books of the author Roald Dahl into the consuming flames on the grounds that Dahl was an unrepentant Jew hater? Or hide away the works of Dylan Thomas because of his pacifism and his involvement with pacifist groups that were calling for disarmament whilst Hitler was rearming? Of course we should not. On the subject of Dahl I’m more than happy for my son to be studying Dahl at school this term not because I approve of Dahl’s views on Jews but because he was a great and wonderful writer. But then maybe that’s because I possess something that yesterday’s Tosspot Taliban doesn’t possess, which is an ability to separate the art from the artist.

History is replete with good people from the worlds of politics, the military, religion and the arts who did and produced good things. However there are also bad people who did good things and produced great art. Churchill was an Imperialist drunk but was the best person to lead Britain during World War II. Oscar Wilde cheated on his wife with Lord Alfred Douglas when male to male relationships were illegal but was one of the best writers of his time in the English language.

I cannot condone Eric Gill’s habit of sexually abusing his daughters or his penchant for dog buggery, in fact I find it revolting. But equally I find I have to condemn the Tosspot Taliban who tried to destroy the statue of Prospero and Ariel. Attacking this statue by Gill does nothing to protect any current child from sexual abuse or exploitation. It doesn’t even do anything to explain the moral vacuum that allowed the BBC to protect Jimmy Savile because he was a ratings draw. It’s empty and destructive performative virtue signalling of the worst kind. The Tosspot Taliban who went mental with a hammer yesterday deserves a significant sentence partly due to his own actions and partially to discourage other similar nutcases.