Sans Gill, Sans Guts, Sans Everything

With so many real, live dangers to women, children and animals in the world, and even in the Government, it should come as no surprise that certain stalwart citizens have chosen to attack a statue by a sex offender who has been dead for eight decades. Claims that its display outside Broadcasting House constitutes a celebration of the sculptor's crimes are surely melodramatic: admittedly, the work depicts characters from The Tempest, but even the Jew-baiting toady William Shakespeare was hardly a Clive or a Colston, though as a patriot and a Christian he would undoubtedly have approved of them both. The forces of cultural cleanliness soiled their argument still further by pushing it in the chaste pages of the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, which has been known both to thunder against the persecution of graven images and to aim the occasional kick at those least able to kick back. Even so, one can only agree that the statue's continued presence at the BBC flies in the face of the corporate ethos that was bold enough to stop using a typeface on moral grounds.