Activists including a 59-year-old university arts centre director egged a statue of Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, as it was installed in her home town of Grantham.
Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, as the greengrocer’s daughter became following her elevation to the House of Lords, won three consecutive British general elections in 1979, 1983, and 1987, being ousted not by the public but by an internal Conservative Partly coup led by europhile parliamentarians opposed to her increasingly eurosceptic stance.
Nevertheless, she remains a hate figure for much of the British left, in large part for her battles with the trade unionists for the country’s then-nationalised coal mines, and plans to install a statue of her in Parliament Square had to be abandoned due to fears it would not survive direction action by a “motivated far-left movement… who may be committed to public activism” — i.e. criminal vandalism.
The statue was instead installed in her home town of Grantham, Lincolnshire on Sunday, but even there is was not safe, with activists turning out to pelt it with eggs from behind a protective barrier.
The vandals included the theoretically respectable Jeremy Webster, deputy director of the Attenborough Arts Centre attached to the publicly-funded University of Leicester, who boasted that he “got first hit with an egg” on social media, according to The Telegraph.
Webster, who also branded Baroness Thatcher a “disgraced animal” on social media, was formerly employed by Lincolnshire County Council, according to the newspaper, and owns a £400,000 home on the street where the late prime minister was born above her father’s store in 1925.
“We have received reports of criminal damage to the Margaret Thatcher statue shortly after 10 a.m. this morning,” the local police force have confirmed in a statement, adding that “No arrests have been made” and “Enquiries are still ongoing.”
Members of the local council, where Conservative politicians hold office, have backed the statue, with one noting that she “will always be a significant part of Grantham’s heritage” and another insisting that it is “good to see and the right thing that her birthplace honours her.”
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