Look for the rust stains at the bottom

One of my fellow guests at High Table was Sir David Butler, one of the founding fathers of British psephology and, through our co-authoring of several books, a good friend. One of the pleasures of working with David is his seemingly inexhaustible treasury of anecdotes about people and places. I got him to tell Sir Ivor the one about the Duke of York’s column. Here it is, as best I could note it down. One day in 1947, as David walked past the column, his good friend, Tony Benn, pointed to a set of rusty stains on the marble column and stated that those stains represented the history of the parliamentary question. In 1855 two drunken cavalry officers had raced their horses up the steps from the Mall to the column for a bet. Viscount Dylan, an old General and an MP had put a question in parliament to the Secretary of State for war about whether such high jinks were appropriate. The minister subsequently posted a sentry at the foot of the column. Then, in the 1870s when it was pouring with rain, somebody noticed a poor sentry standing in the wet and the first Commissioner of Works decided, following another parliamentary question, that a glass canopy should be affixed to the column. In the 1890s an economy-minded MP asked in parliament whether a sentry was necessary. The sentry was removed. And then (if I have got the story right) in 1970 Tony Benn asked, via a parliamentary question, for the canopy to be removed. This was done, crudely, with a hacksaw, but the metal stubs of the supports remained, rusted and created the two stains visible still today on the column…