A 38-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage after Winston Churchill's statue outside the Houses of Parliament was sprayed with graffiti, including the phrase 'Zionist war criminal'. Caspar San Giorgio, of no fixed address, was arrested by Metropolitan police shortly after 4am on Friday and charged in the early hours of Saturday.
The bronze sculpture in Parliament Square was also defaced with slogans such as 'stop the genocide', 'free Palestine', 'never again is now', and 'globalise the intifada'. San Giorgio is due to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates court in London.
The Metropolitan police and Greater Manchester police had previously stated in December that anyone chanting 'globalise the intifada' would face arrest, following two terror attacks: at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October and at Bondi Beach in Australia in December.
The statue was cordoned off after the incident and cleaned on Friday morning. A Greater London Authority spokesperson condemned the vandalism, and a Downing Street spokesperson called it 'completely abhorrent', adding that 'Churchill was a great Briton' and that the perpetrator must be held to account.
This is not the first time the statue has been vandalised; in June 2020, during a Black Lives Matter protest, graffiti accusing Churchill of being a racist was written on it. In October of that year, an Extinction Rebellion activist was ordered to pay over £1,500 after painting 'racist' on its plinth.
The 3.6-metre monument, created by Ivor Roberts-Jones, was unveiled in 1973 by Churchill's wife, Clementine. It is one of 12 statues on or around Parliament Square, including those of Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela.
