A 38-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage after Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square was sprayed with graffiti, including the words '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. He is due to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates court in London.
The bronze sculpture was defaced with red paint bearing slogans such as 'stop the genocide', 'free Palestine', 'never again is now', and 'globalise the intifada'. The Met and Greater Manchester police previously stated in December that anyone chanting 'globalise the intifada' would face arrest, following two terror attacks: one at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October and another at Bondi Beach in Australia in December.
The statue was cordoned off and cleaned on Friday morning. A Greater London Authority spokesperson expressed outrage at the vandalism, stating that work was under way to remove the graffiti. Downing Street also condemned the act, with a No 10 spokesperson saying, 'Churchill was a great Briton. This government will always stand up for our values and the perpetrator must be held to account.'
The 3.6-metre monument, created by Ivor Roberts-Jones and unveiled in 1973 by Churchill's wife Clementine, has been vandalised previously. In June 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests, it was sprayed with the word 'racist'. In October that year, an Extinction Rebellion activist was ordered to pay over £1,500 after painting 'racist' on its plinth.
