The Fourth Plinth - a modest claim to fame
It’s my birthday on 8 March and someone, interviewing me this week (‘A birthday interview” she called it), asked me what I reckoned was my “lifetime achievement” - my “claim to fame”.
I didn’t come up with much of an answer (I’m still working on it), but when she pressed me I did mention a possible modest “claim to fame”. I am the person who noticed the empty plinth that stands in London’s Trafalgar Square and thought something should be done about it.
When I was an MP and a parliamentary private secretary attached to the Department of National Heritage in the mid-1990s, walking to work one day (the Department’s offices were just off Trafalgar Square) I noticed the empty fourth plinth and wondered why its was empty.
The Department’s permanent secretary told me the plinth had been empty since the square had been created. I suggested we put something on the plinth.
‘Such as?’ he asked.
‘A collection of children’s characters created by British authors,’ I ventured, ‘from Winnie-the-Pooh to Paddington Bear.’
He looked at me balefully: ‘It is Trafalgar Square, where we celebrate national heroes.’
‘What about Margaret Thatcher then?’ I said.
‘The plinth stands alongside Nelson’s column,’ he explained, ‘there has to be a martial connection of some sort.’
‘Margaret Thatcher in her tank in the Falklands,’ I countered.
That’s when we came up with the idea of asking the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures to come up with a plan for how best to use the plinth and I believe the rolling programme of changing artworks that was subsequently introduced has worked well – and should continue.
The plinth was originally intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV, but remained bare because of lack of funds. There was talk in the 1990s of the plinth eventually being an appropriate setting for a statue of Elizabeth II on her horse, Burmese, but that feels wrong now. Our longest reigning monarch deserves a stand-alone setting for her memorial. Let’s keep the plinth as it now is: a platform for statues and works of art that change year by year, always interesting, sometimes controversial, occasionally (I hope) amusing. In the fulness of time, even Pooh and Paddington may have their day.