Rhodes Rescued

In a political culture where the Ministry of Defence is concerned with attack, the Ministry of Justice with undermining the courts and the Department of Health and Social Care with depriving people of health and social care, it should come as no surprise that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport should be concerned with all that is crass, petty-minded and insular. Hence the relevant secretary of state has overruled the hotbed of unpatriotic subversion that is Historic England in order to grant listed status to a commemorative plaque at the University of Oxford. The plaque honours Cecil Rhodes, a white supremacist so extreme that even his contemporaries thought he was a lunatic, who earned his retention and explanation by bunging his alma mater some small change in his will. Last year the college expressed a wish to remove the plaque and its accompanying statue but later changed its mind, prompting a boycott by a hundred and fifty academics. Historic England denied that the plaque's artistic quality made it worthy of national interest, thereby prompting the corrective intervention by a woman whose level of culture begins with reality TV and presumably ends with the National Johnson's autohagiographic ascension to the pedestal of Sir Winston Leonard de Pfeffel Churchill.