The fulminators in Britain's modern health-and-safety apparatus have never loved the historical irritation that Winston Churchill was a cigar lover. To that end, a portrait at the entrance to a London museum has been airbrushed to remove a cigar hanging from the wartime PM's mouth.
Visitors to Winston Churchill's Britain At War can see a 1948 photo of the
then-Leader of the Opposition gazing benignly down at them from the
entranceway, his two fingers raised in the V-for-Victory gesture. But where, in
the original print, a trademark stubby cigar is clenched in the left corner of
his mouth, the new version is cigar-free, with the missing lip airbrushed in,
lending Churchill's mouth an uncharacteristic sneer.
The museum has launched a retreat
operation worthy of Dunkirk,
with manager John Walsh claiming he wasn't aware that the picture had been
doctored. Cigar aficionados in London will be entitled to feel aggrieved at
such vandalism, with their pastime now hard to practise in public, despite the
continued existence of a cigar
scene. Despite this ham-fisted attempt to expunge Churchill's cigarophilia and
posthumously rob him of his favoured Romeo y Julietas, the great man's
bacchanalian philosophy speaks more to modern, hedonistic Britain than
our fun-phobic mandarins would like to admit:
"My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking
cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all
meals and in the intervals between them."
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