We failed to get rid of Rhodes so let's pulverise Parliament Square instead.

Demands to remove the statue of racist Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes have fallen at the second hurdle, disappointing many of those who wish to whitewash, edit and censor our history - but don't worry! London alone is still dotted with statues of people who really don't deserve to be there in modern Britain. Let me take you by the wrecking ball and lead you around Parliament Square. 

Jan Smuts. Smuts by name, tosser by nature. PM of South Africa twice. A vocal supporter of apartheid in its earliest form with views on race and segregation that might make even Britain First blush. Smite Smuts now.

David Lloyd-George. WW1 Prime Minister and womaniser who helped draft the Versailles Treaty which led inexorably to the terrible sequel. When that war came he was chief among those wishing to appease that nice Mr Hitler, who he called "The George Washington of Germany." Clearly sulking when nobody asked him to save the nation a second time against his BFF, his general pessimism and unpatriotic beastliness in the early days of the Second War led to Churchill calling him The British Petain. Liquefy Lloyd-George!

Abraham Lincoln. Emancipator of slaves. Great American hero right? WRONG! Lincoln was more concerned with economic realities than the cruelties of slavery - his taking up of the black cause was more to do with self promotion, political expediency and a place in the history books than pretty much anything else. Also a rabidly pro-colonisation, segregationist who wanted to build an American Empire in South America. Atomise Abe!

Robert Peel. Created the Metropolitan Police to crush honest criminals going about their daily criminality. British PM during the Irish Potato Famine and thus indirectly responsible for many of Sinead O'Connor's post "nothing Compares 2 U" work. Murdering scum! Pulverise Peel.

George Canning. Prime Minister. First seat was a rotten borough and the bad start just kept getting worse. Didn't like the French. Or liberty. Attacked and destroyed Copenhagen. Robbed India of its wealth. And as for his views on the Scots ..... well put it this way - he wouldn't get a Christmas card from Nicola Sturgeon. Can Canning!

14th Earl Derby - Tory! Went to Eton! Tory SCUM! Dynamite Derby!

Gandhi - an absolute bastard to his son. Wrote nice letters to Hitler. Religious nut-case. Did nothing at all for the beef industry. Grind up Gandhi!

Nelson Mandela? Terrorist! Encouraged the Spice Girls. Sent Christmas cards to Gaddafi. Er..... NEXT!

Finally. The real villain of the piece. Responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in WW2. He gassed the Kurds and the Russians. In fact he was a long term and enthusiastic advocate of chemical warfare. He could be anti-semitic. He was at the helm and actively fought to maintain a huge and unethical Empire. He blew up the French navy. He said rude things about Muslims. Racist! He nearly converted to Islam. Quisling! He hated the idea of a European Union. Kipper! He longed for a European Union. Leftard! His son was an alcoholic. He ruined Simon Ward's nascent acting career, he kept changing sides politically and he had a macaw (animal abuser) which he taught to swear. He also oversaw the burning of a masterful painting by Graham Sutherland of one of our greatest Prime Ministers, so you can add vandalism to the list. 

Thing is. Apart from the odd monument honouring "War Animals" we don't put up many statues nowadays and I for one think there's a good reason for that. Statues are there to urge respect for state appointed paragons and as Brecht says in Galilleo "unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." Human beings who reach great office are not superheroes, they are people lost in time. As our democracy has matured we have come instinctively to realise that. Time moves on and judgement quite rightly alters with it, but if we seek to exorcise the past, or blow it up, or melt it down we end up with a sanitised and impoverished present. That Santayana epithet:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

is a bit of a cliche, but like many great cliches it is true.

Bowie and Me. A sort of love story.

In the late seventies my older sister bought the Bowie compilation album ChangesOne and played it until the grooves on the record ran shallow. My musical influences had not extended much beyond Ken Dodd and Pinky and Perky at this point, but I was immediately smitten. His voice seemed to come from a different planet and the picture of him radiated a sort of warm, handsome cool that had echoes of the Hollywood greats - while at the same time being slightly unsettling - a kind of menacing handsome. Those mismatched eyes, the too thin cheekbones, the faraway look. When my sister got tired of the record, as teenage girls are wont to do, I lifted it off her and have played it ever since. If you listen to those songs now, from the warm buzz of the title track to the crazyweird John I'm Only Dancing and the sublime rock and roll number Suffragette City, you get a seminar, not just in the otherworldliness of early Bowie but of his incredible eclectic range and famed unwillingness to get pegged down. The distance between Hunky Dory and Golden Years is just five years, but in musical terms it outstrips anything most pop artists achieve in a lifetime of writing.

As I grew up and the eighties broke, Bowie went mainstream. I didn't mind. I was fourteen when Let's Dance came out and suddenly David was cool and other boys views matter when you're fourteen. Alongside the contemporary releases I began to build up a collection of his back catalogue and sheltered in my boarding school bedsit received an education, courtesy of my record player, that I was most certainly not getting in the classroom. Those bizarre and brilliant Berlin records. Low. Heroes. Hard work at first - especially if everyone else is listening to Wham - but ultimately so much more rewarding. Then Lodger with its yaaaassssaaaasssin world music influences. The soul cool of Young Americans. And with Bowie you didn't just get the music. You got film, poetry, art - the man was a polymath. I learned about Andy Warhol from him. And Laurens Van der Post. And Nicolas Roeg. And Egon Schiele. And Eno. And Philip Glass. And that men could wear dresses. And that Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd were better than what came after. And that you didn't have to give the public what they wanted. And that working class popstars from Bromley could produce lines of poetry every bit as good as Byron or Edgar Allen Poe:

"We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when

Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend

Which came as some surprise

I spoke into his eyes

I thought you died, a long, long time ago."

Fashions came and fashions went and his stock grew with time and not everything he did was brilliant but you could never accuse Bowie of being dull or standing still. He was always interesting. Challenging. Changing. Other heroes faded, David never did. He was never irrelevant.

There's a great line in Kooks where Bowie, addressing his young son Zowie, now Duncan, sings:

"And if the homework brings you down, then we'll throw it on the fire and take the car downtown."

I remember my friend Andy Chappell and I listening to that in our cold Northamptonshire boarding school and him saying to me "If I ever have a son and everything gets too much, I'm going to sing that to him." I don't know if Andy ever did, but last week when my 11 year old found his homework too much I did - and we did - and as we did we listened to Blackstar on the CD player and my son said: "The thing with Bowie is - that the more you listen - the better he gets." 

So thank you David. Thank you for entertaining me and my family. Thank you for holding my hand through broken hearts and teenage angst and failed projects and new horizons. Thank you for educating me, for thrilling me, for teaching me about art and film and music and what it is to be young and what it is to grow old. Thank you for the wayward turns and the fashion tips.Thank you for Blackstar and Rock and Roll Suicide and Win and China Girl and Julie and V2 Schneider and yes - even the Laughing Gnome. You have been much more than the soundtrack to my life and - you have been an inspiration.