Picton Unpictured

As if the woke pogrom against the nation's statuary were not enough, the beastly Welsh have dared to censor a portrait of the highest-ranking officer to be killed at Waterloo. The image of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, Member of Parliament and sometime governor of Trinidad, is now partially obscured by a strut in front of the great man's equipment, and has been surrounded with material providing, of all things, context. Picton's régime in Trinidad was so British that he was prosecuted for excessive cruelty, immoderate severity towards slaves, carrying out summary executions without due process, and imposing the military penalty of picketing (stringing up by the wrist) upon a fourteen-year-old free mulatto girl. Picton argued that such measures were forced upon him by European red tape, and the Privy Council duly dismissed almost all the charges. After a jury was impudent enough to pronounce him guilty of torturing the girl, Picton gained a retrial in which he was set at liberty while the court was adjourned for deliberations so thorough that no verdict was ever reached. It remains as yet unclear whether the Minister for Cultchah, Murdoch and Rah-rah intends to intervene on the portrait's behalf; presumably because Picton sat in Parliament as a Whig (a Liberal Democrat, in modern currency) rather than for the natural party of corporal punishment and wog control.