Toppling of the giants: Rachel Reeves launched a purge – and throughout Whitehall portraits of those nice historic figures have been changed by works of ‘feminine empowerment’ and even a Communist

As the nation marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day next month, descendants of Sir Winston Churchill will take part in a commemorative service alongside the Royal Family in Westminster Abbey.

The Cabinet War Rooms bunker, used during the Blitz, will also feature, alongside the wartime leader’s birthplace, Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace. Events will further be held at Chartwell, Churchill’s much-loved home in the Kent countryside, now one of the National Trust’s most popular attractions.

But while Churchill, and the places he knew and loved, will be central to this anniversary – perhaps the last that many veterans will be able to attend – he has been relegated to a secondary role around the Westminster estate by the cultural commissars in the current government.

Immediately after his inauguration as US President in January, Donald Trump re-installed the famous bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Yet at least five images of the British PM have been removed from Downing Street and Parliament since Sir Keir Starmer swept to power less than a year ago.

Among them were an evocative photograph from 1945 showing Churchill at the Cenotaph: stripped from Portcullis House, the main office building for MPs. Over in the Treasury, a famous 1919 portrait of Churchill has been replaced by an abstract woollen tapestry depicting an ‘unknown woman’ by minor Scottish artist Margaret Maran.

Churchill may have been a Tory – yet his roles in establishing minimum wages for certain trades and introducing labour exchanges (known today as Job Centres) are rarely celebrated by the Left.

Every government, of course, enjoys its pick of the 10,000-strong Parliamentary Art Collection, and a degree of chopping and changing is normal. But the current Labour administration have wasted no time in banishing as many symbols of Britain’s past as possible.

In this, they may have been spurred by an ‘audit’ for alleged ‘links to slavery and racism’ that the Collection underwent following the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. This found, perhaps inevitably given the febrile climate of that time, that hundreds of pieces had connections, however tenuous, to the slave trade.

Throughout history, the Left has often shown a fondness for purging the cultural artefacts of the past, from the Soviets banning artists whose ideologies conflicted with their own to Pol Pot’s genocidal ‘Year Zero’, which sought to wipe out any trace of life in Cambodia before 1975.

Starmer, a self-professed socialist, has made no attempt to halt the ongoing cultural reset taking place on his watch.

Dozens of paintings and other artworks have been removed from MPs’ offices and across the Parliamentary estate – and nor has Downing Street escaped.

Despite Whitehall being urged to cut costs after Rachel Reeves’s clumsy stewardship of the economy plunged Britain into low-growth, high-tax ‘stagflation’, so pronounced is this artistic clear-out that I can reveal the Department of Culture recently allocated £85,000 for a one-year contract to provide ‘transport and installation services’ for government artworks. That’s a lot of rehanging.

Founded in 1899, at the zenith of Empire, the Parliamentary Art Collection now incorporates prints, paintings, drawings and works in various media by great British artists from JMW Turner to LS Lowry.

Yet our modern rulers – assisted by the ‘Heritage Collections Team’ and the ‘Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art’ – tend to have more exotic contemporary tastes.

No fewer than three portraits of the Duke of Wellington – the country’s second-most popular PM after Churchill, according to pollsters YouGov – have been banished from display since Labour’s victory last July. Wellington, whose 1815 victory at the Battle of Waterloo was of course pivotal in shaping world history, initially opposed the abolition of the slave trade before helping to put an end to it.

Other important British historical figures have been similarly excised. They include four portraits of Elizabeth I and her confidant Sir Walter Raleigh, who helped repel the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Among them is a large 1592 portrait of Elizabeth by the fine Flemish artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, now put into storage. Replacing this and the Raleigh portrait are two works about ‘female empowerment’ by Portuguese artist Paula Rego, who specialised in depicting abortion.

Portraits of senior Labour figures including Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and ex-culture minister Baroness Hodge have also been installed as part of a push to boost ‘gender and ethnic diversity’.

Five images of Oliver Cromwell have been removed from Parliament, along with several paintings of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert: this last is perhaps expected given that Starmer once boasted of being an ardent republican.

A portrait of the last of Victoria’s ten prime ministers, Lord Salisbury, has gone the same way. Salisbury enjoyed 14 years in No 10, winning three general elections for the Conservatives in 1886, 1895 and 1901. In that final ballot, he polled more than 50 per cent – towering above the 34 per cent Starmer achieved last summer. Perhaps no wonder his picture’s gone, then.

Starmer has further evicted from his study a portrait of Baroness Thatcher commissioned by Gordon Brown, the previous Labour PM, and unveiled by the Iron Lady herself in 2009 for permanent display. Starmer insisted to the BBC that he didn’t like ‘pictures of people staring down at me’, though he joked that he ‘might tolerate’ the image of ex-Arsenal striker Thierry Henry.

There isn’t even room for William Shakespeare: an 18th-century portrait of the Bard has been taken down from No 10 – the first time in probably more than a century that Downing Street does not display a portrait of England’s – and arguably the world’s – foremost literary genius.

Five paintings of titanic Liberal PM William Gladstone, who romped home in four general elections between 1868 and 1892, have also been expunged.

What an irony: the pioneering reformer legislated so that women could control their property after marriage and donated £10 million (in modern sums) of his own money to good causes, while removing the taxes that had put newspapers beyond the reach of the ordinary people. Though Gladstone never owned slaves, he is judged by his pitiless critics to have benefited from his father’s ownership of slaves, meaning his image is not longer fit to be seen.

Next door at No 11, Rachel Reeves has been just as concerned with the decor, issuing a blanket ban on any works of art depicting or painted by men in the State Dining Room. So out has gone the bust of Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory PM who did more than anyone else in the 19th century to improve the living standards of ordinary people by demolishing thousands of slums and building new homes for workers.

She has further removed any sign of David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor and later PM who introduced the state pension and brought in a progressive taxation system so that the poor were supported by the rich. The ‘Welsh Wizard’ served as chancellor for seven years – a record few expect the embattled Reeves to match.

Not even William Wilberforce, the great slave-trade abolitionist, survived the Starmer-Reeves purge.

A large portrait of James II in one of Number 11’s State Rooms, posing in a suit of armour, has also been sent to storage because of his apparent links to the slave trade.

In its place is a maquette of the Suffragist Millicent Fawcett by ‘conceptual artist’ Gillian Wearing, who notoriously scrawled (minus the asterisks) ‘F*** Cilla Black’ on the cover of the Guardian newspaper’s features section in 2003 – a vulgar stunt for which she was forced to apologise.

Other artworks deemed worthy of display include ‘Covid Anxiety 5 (Mask Disorder)’, a squiggle in a red ballpoint pen by Donna Coleman who, according to the government’s own website, ‘reconnected with painting around 2010 as a means to express her experienced with depression’ [sic].

If Coleman’s red ballpoint isn’t uplifting enough, visitors to No 11 can also take in ‘Portrait of a Woman (Invisible Virus)’, a collage of magazine cut-outs compiled by Lisa Fielding-Smith, whose interests include ‘feminist theory, hysteria, witchcraft, fairy tales and gender performativity’.

Most strikingly of all, Reeves has ordered a portrait of celebrated Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson to be taken down from her Treasury office wall and replaced with a photograph of ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson. This lifelong Marxist and ultra-Left Labour minister helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain, proudly travelling to Moscow to pay homage to Lenin and Trotsky.

Deputy PM Angela Rayner, a darling of the trade union movement who has called Conservative ministers ‘a bunch of scum’, hasn’t disappointed her radical fanbase, either. She has picked ‘Marching Out’, an image of the Durham Miners Gala, by ex-miner George Robson, to grace her official walls.

Science Secretary Peter Kyle has chosen a colour photograph of a rusting and lichen-smeared metal structure over a body of water. Taken in 2006 by Nick Waplington, the piece is called ‘Random Growth Without Loss of Stability’. They wouldn’t be able to hang that in the Treasury.

Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, has come under sustained fire in recent months for his role in the Chagos Islands surrender. He’s also been criticised for acting for a raft of clients opposed to British interests before he entered government, including Gerry Adams, described in Parliament as the ‘godfather of terrorism’.

So it is fitting, perhaps, that this very model of a modern human rights lawyer has chosen an etching called ‘Map of Nowhere’ by cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry to hang in his office.

Culture minister Sir Chris Bryant, who happens to be gay, is another fan of Perry and has also opted for works by John Minton, an ‘exuberantly queer’ illustrator who committed suicide aged 39 in 1957.

It all adds up to quite the collection. Lawrence Goldman, Professor of History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, is scathing about the changes.

‘Do these modern lightweight politicians really believe this is the way to do history?’ he asks. ‘To find fault with the past? To point the finger of blame at figures whose abilities and significance far outweigh those of our current leaders?’

He continues: ‘How do we explain these attacks on our national history? Ignorance is part of it: Governments no longer contain people with historical awareness.

‘Partisanship is to blame as well: past generations could honour the achievements of their predecessors of whatever party. Immaturity must be part of it, also: anyone with genuine insight into human affairs would know not to judge the past by present standards.’

A Department of Culture spokesman said that works of art were ‘swapped around all the time’. A spokesman for the Parliamentary Art Collection said: ‘While some MPs proactively select artworks in their offices, others do not. For example… the Minister for Transport might have artworks relating to transport… The artwork in these offices is not necessarily a reflection of the MP’s personal choice.’

Bryant dismissed suggestions the collection was being politicised and added, in a telling echo of his department’s line, ‘we swap paintings around all the time’.

He went on to describe the rehanging of works by or depicting women in the state dining room of 11 Downing Street as ‘absolutely stunning’.

But that, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder.