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| Churchill bust with George W Bush |
Within hours of moving into the
White House, Donald Trump has honoured his pledge to return the bust of Winston
Churchill to the Oval Office.
The Jacob Epstein sculpture was given to
President George W Bush by Tony Blair.
It was displayed in the Oval Office but was
removed by President Barack Obama and replaced by a bust of Martin Luther King
in 2009.
The former president's
decision to send the bust back to the British embassy in Washington was greeted with outrage on both sides of
the Atlantic.
Mr Obama sought to deflect the criticism by
saying he had a second bust of Churchill which he kept in his private quarters.
“My private office is called the Treaty Room.
Right outside the door of the Treaty Room so that I see it every day, including
on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the
primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill,” he said.
But critics were unconvinced. Boris Johnson,
who was London mayor at the time, said the move was a "snub to
Britain". He suggested that the decision had been fuelled by what he
described as Mr Obama's "ancestral dislike of the British Empire".
Mr Trump, who has a Scottish mother and is
regarded as an Anglophile, had hinted that he was ready to return the bust to
its pride of place in the Oval Office in a New York Times interview.
The case for returning the Epstein bust to the
White House was pressed by Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, who forged a
close relationship with Mr Trump.
***
To me this was one
of the first markers that indicated how dangerous the Obama presidency would be.
As one who had read most of Churchill’s books and several Churchill biographies, I was appalled when I learned the Obama had removed the bust from
the White House. If Obama had so little respect for Churchill who in 1940 stood
alone facing Hitler and saved western civilization, then it was obvious that
Obama did not care for our civilization.
Thank you, President Trump for returning Churchill's bust to the Oval Office.
