Rhodes Scholars are not the only dissenters, not by a country mile. You'll have to ask them about their principles, not us. On the whole, I'm not for knocking statues down. A statue is by no means an automatic object of veneration, designed to deprave and corrupt. Sometimes, as I walk round London or my favourite places in Spain or Italy I don't even bother to find out who the statues are of most of the time. However, this particular one may be a different case. You have to walk past the thing towering over you every time you walk into the college, which could be construed as slightly bashing students round the head with a compulsory morsel of shameful history. For seven years I taught in a Catholic school in East London that had a fifteen-foot high crucifix, replete with every gory multicoloured detail of Christ's alleged murder, planted in the ground outside the main entrance. Even though I was still a Catholic in those days, I regarded this ugly monstrosity as highly inappropriate as a daily first school experience for eleven-year-olds, but hey. Why not put Cecil in a side room with a note explaining his place in history, so that sighting him becomes a bit more voluntary?

I watched a documentary on Spain last night which, among other things, featured a section on the Valley Of The Fallen in the Guadarrama Valley outside Madrid. It's essentially a monument to Franco's victory in the Civil War, commissioned by the man himself. It was largely constructed by Republican prisoners. It covers five square miles, contains a basilica that was consecrated by Pope John XIII (for Christ's sake!), a Benedictine monastery and is capped by a 500-foot stone cross, the tallest in the world, which can be seen from 20 miles away. The site is the burial place for thousands who were killed in the Civil War. Only one person who didn't die that way is buried there, guess who, mass murderer Francisco Franco himself. What would you do with it? It's been massively controversial in Spain for decades. Most Spanish people now see what a bad man El Caudillo truly was, yet here is his enduring monument, one of the biggest things in Spain. Nowt to do with this Brit, but if I were a Spaniard I'd be campaigning to have the site levelled, basilica and all, and turned into a shrine and country park dedicated to Franco's hundreds of thousands of victims, during the war and after.