Tory fury as UK’s Starmer moves Thatcher portrait

LONDON — Britain’s new prime minister prompted howls of Conservative outrage after he removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from her former study in No. 10 Downing Street.
Labour’s Keir Starmer was branded “petty” and “nasty” for shifting a £100,000 Richard Stone painting of the late Tory prime minister to another room in the official government residence.
Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin said this week that Starmer, who heads up Britain’s new center-left government, had found the portrait “unsettling” and asked for it to be taken down. The comments were first reported by the Herald.
The move sparked swift condemnation from Conservative grandees — and splashed the front pages of right-leaning papers the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
Right-wing veteran John Redwood, who headed up Thatcher’s policy unit, told the Daily Mail: “I’m not at all surprised he’s done this. He wouldn’t want to be embarrassed by comparison with a far better prime minister.” Redwood accused Starmer of being “pessimistic, negative and nasty.”
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith joined the attack, dubbing Starmer “petty” and saying he had thrown “red meat to his hard Left.”
Pressed on the row Friday, government minister Jacqui Smith said her boss — who once praised Thatcher for bringing “meaningful change” to the U.K. — “can’t win.”
“A few months ago he was being criticized for talking about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy and the elements of her leadership that he respected, and now he’s being criticized for asking for a few pictures to be moved around,” she told GB News.
Smith pointed out that a portrait of Thatcher remains in a Downing Street gallery with all former prime ministers. “Just to be clear, there are portraits of Margaret Thatcher as there are of all previous prime ministers in No. 10,” she added. “And that, of course, is absolutely right.”
Stone’s portrait of Thatcher has a storied bipartisan history. It was commissioned by then-Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009 as a tribute to the right-wing leader’s achievements in office.