continues to take shape. There’s even a website dedicated to the campaign, which is where I found this picture, a maquette of the proposed statue by Amanda Ward. I like it, especially the visual resonances between it and the statue Haw must have looked at more than any other, that of Churchill, or the ‘old gasbag’ as he liked to call him.

Haw:

Churchill:

has died. After a decade of campaigning in Parliament Square he has lost his battle against lung cancer.

I remember asking him back in 2007, in the days after the Nelson Mandela statue went up in Parliament Square, whether he would like a statue erected in his memory. Continue reading →

I suspect, written about now as much as he will be in years to come.

The event of his protest as much as its sheer length seems to say a lot about our judicial system along with the English tradition of protest. Here is a bloody-minded protester at the very heart of a Protestant land. If he ever moves on, there really should be a monument in his memory – a bed of forget-me-nots as Haw once suggested.

Yesterday I saw this wonderful piece on the man by Sam Leith, in the Evening Standard. In my eccentrics book I describe him (Haw not Leith) as a Captain Ahab figure gazing endlessly at the white whale over the road that is Parliament. Leith compares him to another Melville creation, Bartleby, as you’ll see. I think this works.