Margaret Thatcher statue vandalised with hammer and sickle weeks after being egged
Margaret Thatcher. (Getty)
A statue of Margaret Thatcher has been vandalised again two weeks after it was egged.
The £300,000 carving, which was erected in the late former prime minister’s home town of Grantham, was found splattered with red paint on 28 May.
A red hammer and sickle was also painted on the fence surrounding it.
A spokesperson for the district council told the Grantham Journal that they are “aware of the damage” caused to the statue and are “working with internal and external partners, including the police, to resolve this.”
The incident is believed to have taken place late in the evening on 27 May. Lincolnshire Police are treating the defacement as criminal damage.
“We received reports of a person shown on CCTV acting suspiciously near the site,” a spokesperson for Lincolnshire Police said in a statement. “Officers attended and found graffiti had been spray-painted onto the barriers surrounding the statue.
“No damage was thought to have been caused to the statue itself.”
Today, the Margaret Thatcher statue in Grantham, England was vandalised with red paint. A hammer and sickle was also spray painted underneath 🚩☭ pic.twitter.com/ofTVslbAwT
— Challenge (@ChallengeYCL) May 29, 2022
It comes after university arts chief Jeremy Webster egged the statue just hours after it was assembled on 15 May. The 59-year-old was fined £90 under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for the protest.
Originally intended for Parliament Square in Westminster, the Margaret Thatcher statue was moved to Grantham out of increasing fears a “motivated far-left movement” would target it.
A South Kesteven planning committee eventually accepted the statue in 2019.
Still, the backlash against the statue has been severe since its installation, with motorists and passers-by shouting to “tear it down” and “this is no good for Grantham, is it?” The council responded by installing a surveillance camera opposite the sculpture.
The expensive statue was funded by the Public Memorials Appeal through public donations and installed on a 3 metre-high plinth to discourage vandalism.
The notoriously anti-LGBT+ Conservative prime minister was responsible for Section 28, which outlawed the so-called promotion of homosexuality by schools and local authorities, silencing a generation of LGBTQ+ people.
She was born and raised in Grantham, where her father was mayor at the time.
