V&A forced to backtrack on calling Thatcher a ‘contemporary villain’

The Victoria and Albert Museum has changed its labelling of Margaret Thatcher as a “contemporary villain” alongside Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden after facing a backlash.

Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, said that she did not think it was “appropriate” to name Britain’s first female prime minister in a list of “unpopular public figures” alongside the Nazi dictator and al-Qaeda’s former chief in an exhibition of British humour through the ages, featuring a Punch and Judy display.

The controversial caption originally read: “Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.”

It sparked outrage among Conservative politicians, with Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, slamming the V&A for proposing that Thatcher “would equate to any of those vile human beings” and questioning whether the London museum, whose director is Tristram Hunt, the former Labour MP, should continue to receive public funding.

Sir Conor Burns, a former trade minister and the Conservative MP for Bournemouth West, said: “Whoever wrote that caption should be called out publicly for being a moron, or perhaps more usefully sent to read a Ladybird book of modern world history. 

“It is sadly symptomatic of the woke, luvvie-dom nonsense that persists in our public institutions. They should be given a serious rap across the knuckles and a clarion instruction to grow up.”

Responding to the furore, the V&A confirmed on Thursday that it had “reviewed the label text which appears in the Punch and Judy case of our Laughing Matters display” and concluded that “the original wording was open to misinterpretation”.

A spokesman confirmed that a new label was now in place. It reads: “Although seen as traditionally British, Punch and Judy evolved from 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte performances. The original narrative in the seaside puppet show’s Victorian heyday featured domestic violence, hangings and racist caricatures – a jarring and unacceptable combination for modern audiences. The characters have since been re-cast to reflect figures in the public eye – from Adolf Hitler during wartime to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s being portrayed as villains, to more recently Nick Clegg as the clown and Simon Cowell as the judge.”

According to 2022-23 figures, the museum received most of its income, more than £67 million, from the taxpayer via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

It is not the first time that the V&A’s treatment of Thatcher, who died in 2013, has provoked an outcry. In 2015, it was criticised for refusing to accept a selection of her suits and handbags. 

Hundreds of items, from her wedding dress to her red prime ministerial dispatch box, were offered in the hope they would be kept together on public display rather than auctioned and scattered across the world.

But the museum “politely declined”, saying that it collected only items of “outstanding aesthetic or technical quality” rather than those with “intrinsic social historical value”. Bosses later claimed that no formal offer had been made.

The following year, the V&A did put on an exhibition of some of the former prime minister’s clothes, donated by her children, Mark and Carol, including the distinctive royal blue suit she wore as she voted in the 1987 general election.

At the time, Claire Wilcox, the museum’s senior curator of fashion, said that this constituted “a record of the working wardrobe of one of the most influential and powerful women of the 20th century”.

The V&A is the world’s largest museum of decorative art and design, with more than two million objects.