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For Now                

London Conservative activists have received local government planning permission to erect sixteen feet of Ronald Reagan statue outside America’s Grosvenor Square embassy, but the statue may become an orphan when a new embassy is built in South London.

Westminster Council overrode its own rule that monument subjects must be dead ten years, and the ten foot statue [with a Berlin Wall chunk placed demurely at its feet] is to be mounted on a six foot high plinth.

It might be considered a companion piece to the Eisenhower statue which already dresses up the Embassy’s impressive      barricade collection.

The Obama administration has yet to name an Ambassador to Britain, and in the meanwhile we are free to draw humorous inferences from anonymous embassy utterances, which make clear this is not their deal:

“This is not something that we have requested or actively tried to get brought about,” an embassy spokesman said yesterday. “We’re happy to have our presidents honoured but this statue was not a US Government initiative.”

Asked whether the mission would take the statue with it when it leaves Grosvenor Square for its new head-quarters in Nine Elms, south of the Thames, he replied: “It’s not our statue.”

If  Reagan is left behind he may soon be engulfed in a construction site: Westminster wants the sixties classic building gone.