London, Jan. 21: A bust of Winston Churchill, which was removed from the Oval Office by Barack Obama in 2009, has now been restored to its earlier position by Donald Trump in one of his first acts as President.
This symbolic gesture has delighted the British who interpret it as a sign that the new President wants to be best friends again with the UK.
The British were outraged when Obama returned the Churchill bust to the British embassy in Washington and replaced it with one of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr.
Boris Johnson, then mayor of London and now Britain's foreign secretary, attacked Obama's decision to remove the Churchill in almost racist terms and said: "Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire - of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender."
Obama tried to soothe ruffled British feathers by pointing out that he had another bust of the great British wartime leader in his private quarters in the White House.
But he was never completely forgiven by the British establishment.
Obama explained his decision: "When I was elected as President of the United States, my predecessor had kept a Churchill bust in the oval office. There are only so many tables where you can put busts otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered. And I thought it was appropriate and I suspect that most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African-American President, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office."
He made it clear no disrespect to Churchill and said: "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."
The Churchill bust by distinguished sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was born in New York but moved to Britain, was gifted to President George W. Bush by Tony Blair. It is said to be a replica of a bust given to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960. After meeting Trump in November, former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said he was "especially pleased at his very positive reaction to the idea that Winston Churchill's bust should be put back in the Oval Office".
Trump, who has a Scottish mother and is regarded as an Anglophile, first hinted that he was ready to return the bust to its pride of place in the Oval Office in an interview with the New York Times interview. Yesterday, as he signed his first papers as US's 45th President, the Churchill bust was spotted back in its place.
Though Churchill, as wartime leader, was voted the "greatest Briton of all time" in a BBC poll in 2002, British historians have not ignored the controversial aspects of his character. One was the green signal given by Churchill to the Royal Air Force to carry out saturation bombing of civilian areas of Germany, notably Dresden, when there appeared to be little military logic to the exercise.
A historian, Madhusree Mukerjee, has held Churchill responsible for aggravating the Bengal Famine of 1943 in her book, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II.
Former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings, a military historian, has said that the "book offers the fullest account I have read.... I myself have argued that Churchill's disdain for the interests of black and brown peoples besmirched his awesome wartime record".
It is considered ironic that in Parliament Square in London, Churchill's statue is not too far from that of Mahatma Gandhi which was unveiled in 2015. Churchill had derided Gandhi as a "seditious Middle Temple lawyer" and "half naked" fakir. On the other hand he liked Nehru - both were Harrow boys.
