A swear word was sprayed onto the base of the Margaret Thatcher statue (Picture: Lee McLean/SWNS)
A statue commemorating a former prime minister has been daubed with a rather rude word – and police want to speak to an unlikely person.
A pensioner has been caught on CCTV apparently spraying the word ‘b******’ onto the plinth holding a statue of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister.
The act of vandalism happened overnight on March 5 in Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham, Lincolnshire.
Police are asking the woman in the picture to come forward.
The rude word has since been removed from the statue, which cost £300,000 and was unveiled in May 2022.
Its installation was controversial and it has been egged and spat on – with some jokers even marking the statue as a public toilet on Google Maps.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, which started in 1984 – though whether the timing of the graffiti was accidental or intentional remains to be seen.
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister between 1979 and 1990, and while at the helm shut 20 collieries with the loss of 20,000 jobs.
Roughly three-quarters of the country’s 187,000 miners went on strike, meaning thousands of police officers were drafted in to man the picket lines.
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