Waterloo Place in central London boasts several monuments connected to the Empire, including an equestrian statue of Edward VII and John Bell’s beautiful memorial to the Allies’ victory in the Crimean War.

In April this year, another – rather more tawdry – statue appeared there overnight. It depicts a man, obviously a politician, holding a flag on a pole and marching forwards. But the wind has blown the flag into his face and he is about to stride off the plinth.

Geddit? Blinded by pride in his country, the politician falls flat on his face. Only fools are patriots. 

The tiresome piece is inevitably the work of Robin Gunningham, the self-styled ‘guerilla artist’ and ex-public schoolboy who still goes by the name ‘Banksy’, but whose cover was brilliantly and permanently blown by The Mail on Sunday in 2008.

Gunningham’s fans no doubt believe he was being oh-so daring to put the statue up – but think about it. If you or I tried to erect a huge new artwork in the heart of London, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace and government buildings, the police would come down on us in minutes. We would be arrested for criminal damage at best, and for terrorism offences at worst.

Yet Westminster Council has called the statue a ‘striking addition to the city’s vibrant public art scene’. The office of Sadiq Khan cooed: ‘The mayor is hopeful that [Gunningham’s] latest piece can be preserved for Londoners and visitors to enjoy.’

I suspect the authorities were approached in advance about the stunt and enthusiastically agreed to it. A truly brave work of art would be dissident and counter-cultural.

In Communist Cuba, where the taps run dry and the hospitals lack basic medicines, a graffiti artist called ‘Fabian’ scrawls his motto ‘2+2=5’ on walls and doorways around Havana. This is a clear and – given the island’s secret police – dangerous reference to the reality-denying horror of life under Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which to that artist bears so many parallels with the Castros’ hereditary tyranny.

Fabian has real courage. In Britain, an artist genuinely willing to defy convention in Waterloo Place might point out that the Empire brought enormous benefits to millions in Africa and Asia.

But good luck to you if you bought yourself a tin of spraypaint and tried to do a picture with that message. Not only would you be arrested after making a few strokes; you would be castigated by the political and social establishment as a dangerous subversive.

Labour politicians like Sadiq Khan and those Left-wing Westminster councillors, of course, care little for British patriotism. No wonder they celebrate ‘art’ that scorns it.

Last April, Gunningham daubed an image on to the exterior wall of the Royal Courts of Justice that was ridiculous even by his standards. It depicted a judge in wig and robes lifting a gavel – not something actually used in English courts – and using it to batter a protester clutching a bloodstained placard and lying defencelessly on the ground.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the ‘artwork’ cost taxpayers a staggering £85,000 to scrub clean from the Grade-II listed courthouse.

It was hardly worth it for an obvious, rather adolescent allusion to the conviction of the protesters for Palestine Action, a proscribed terrorist organisation.

Police arrest criminals and judges enforce their punishment. Society would collapse otherwise. But, of course, liberal prejudice favours the ‘pro-Gaza’ mob. Palestine Action may count a few blameless octogenarian grannies among its supporters, but its core are a thoroughly nasty bunch.

Not only did the group’s members do damage worth £1.2million to an armaments factory near Bristol in 2024, one activist also inflicted horrible violence on the police who tried to prevent the attack.

The hammer-wielding judge in Gunningham’s graffito is even more offensive when one remembers that 23-year-old ex-Oxford student Samuel Corner used a sledgehammer to savagely batter a young police sergeant, Kate Evans, fracturing her spine.

The genuinely brave and counter-cultural thing for Gunningham to do would be to paint graffiti that reminded passers-by of the bestial rapes, murders and kidnappings committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 – or the tortures and mutilations inflicted on the hundreds of innocent Israeli hostages seized in that pogrom.

But of course the absurd ‘Banksy’ would never even consider that. This despicable figure is nothing more than a tame propagandist for the orthodox woke opinions of our liberal ruling regime.

In his silly pictures, sculptures and gimmicks, he is giving visual expression to what any self-righteous editor at the BBC, any Guardian columnist, any soft-Left supporter of Andy Burnham and his shower of useless MPs believe.

So, at Glastonbury last year, Gunningham arranged a stunt in which an inflatable dinghy, containing figures who were meant to be illegal migrants, was reverently passed over the heads of the audience.

Those ageing hipsters, nostalgic for their probably not very rebellious youth, had all paid hundreds and in some cases thousands of pounds to be at the festival. Half of them were probably on drugs and few were thinking straight.

Had they done so, they would have realised that whatever one’s sympathies for the small number of women and children contained in the boats crossing the Channel, we cannot allow endless numbers of people to continue infiltrating our borders and defying our immigration laws day after day.

Yet again, at ‘Glasto’, Gunningham was simply reproducing the sentimental feelings of the group whose opinions he apes and flatters – and enjoying masses of free advertising on the BBC, which sends hundreds of staff to the woke shindig every year.

His art is supposedly free and for the people, but he has made himself prodigiously rich by selling prints and spin-offs. One of his originals sold recently at Sotheby’s for £4.2million.

In Stalinist Russia and National Socialist Germany, artists who were prepared to sell their souls were enlisted as propagandists. They depicted, in Hitler’s Reich, smiling Aryan mothers cuddling little blonde Nazi children. 

In 1930s Russia, probably the unhappiest country in the history of the world, where millions were killed and imprisoned behind barbed wire, state-sanctioned painters portrayed cheerful women driving gleaming tractors on collective farms and, in a land where millions died of starvation, well-fed mechanics toiling merrily in factories.

While not in the same league, Gunningham nonetheless celebrates the very liberal nightmare that has brought the Western world to the verge of collapse.

His work is obviously bad, ugly and artistically worthless but he is a talented self-promoter.

Though he was identified by the Daily Mail’s sister paper almost 20 years ago – and uses the pseudonym ‘David Jones’ in public, shared with 15,000 other men in Britain – the reverent convention, especially on the BBC but also from politicians and fawning Leftie art critics, remains to use his daft unimoniker.

In other words, unlike real rebels and other vandals, Gunningham is protected by the establishment.

The reason for this is obvious: he’s an establishment stooge.