A petition is urging a portrait of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to be reinstalled in 10 Downing Street. It was removed by former Prime Minister Keir Starmer after he claimed he did not like “pictures of people staring down at me” and preferred landscapes.
“To remove the likeness of the first woman ever to lead this country from the room that bears her name is to treat our history as a matter of personal comfort,” the petition, led by the Margaret Thatcher Centre, says. “It sets a precedent by which any future occupant of Number 10 may quietly edit the record of those who came before. It also denies a new generation the sight of a woman who reached the highest office in the land at a time when no woman had done so before.”
Urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to reinstall the portrait, the petition says doing so would be a “modest but telling opportunity” for Burnham to follow through on his pledge to make “politics work better.”
“It would simply affirm that the office of Prime Minister stands above the party that happens to hold it, and that the achievements of Baroness Thatcher belong to the nation rather than to a storeroom,” the organization wrote. “We do not ask the Prime Minister to share her convictions. We ask him to honour the office she held with such distinction, and the history she made in holding it.”
The portrait of Thatcher was commissioned in 2007 by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Artist Richard Stone completed the work in 2009.
