Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph:

A biographer of Winston Churchill has accused the National Portrait Gallery of a “barefaced lie” over a claim in an artwork that the wartime prime minister starved Indians deliberately.

The taxpayer-funded attraction in Trafalgar Square has installed a 40-minute film by Helen Cammock, an artist, whose voice-over narration claims the leader used mass starvation as a weapon of war.

Lord Roberts’s letter, signed by more than 50 peers, including Churchill’s grandson Lord Soames, has described the film as an “ideologically motivated rant”. It adds: “The accusation that it was deliberately visited upon Bengalis by Churchill is foul and vile. It is also historically ludicrous.”…

In his letter, addressed to Prof Shearer West, the interim chairman of the gallery’s board, Lord Roberts defended the statesman, stating that a typhoon destroyed the vital rice crop on which Bengal depended, along with key infrastructure.

He writes that, despite the threat to allied shipping and the difficulty of wartime conditions, Churchill directed that “every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to alleviate local shortages”. He also pleaded for supplies from allies in Australia, Canada and the US.

The gallery has been told these measures were clearly not the work of the “genocidal maniac described by Ms Cammock”, and the board has been asked to explain how the video installation was justified.

I’m not surprised. They’re very “woke” now, the NPG. The Taylor-Wessing portrait show I visited in January featured a photo showing the “gender euphoria” of a young woman who’d just had a double mastectomy:

“Pip Jay King has been photographing Danni over the past four years, following their personal journey as a transgender and non-binary person. Danni’s experience, undergoing top surgery and masculinising hormone therapy, is visualised in this moment of joy and serenity. Through this documentation Danni is able to see themselves as King does: “at home in their body, radiating gender euphoria on a spring day.” The bodily details we can see indicate a personal passage which is captured in this moment of liberation.“

There was a party of young schoolgirls at the exhibition, no doubt soaking up the message. Lovely.