On Thursday morning, a five-metre tall overweight black woman in a tight blue dress and matching heels was unveiled on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth and described to the public as a contemporary “everywoman.”

City Hall has called Lady in Blue a symbol of ‘confidence and purpose’. CNN framed the same object as a victory because it is “not another White man.” Ordinary Londoners looking at the thing itself reached a simpler verdict: identity politics on a plinth.

The 16th Fourth Plinth commission is the work of New York artist Tschabalala Self. The figure is bejewelled and mid-stride, with a giant behind.

The Mayor’s Press Office posted the official line within hours of the unveiling. “London’s Fourth Plinth is one of the most exciting public art commissions in the world,” it wrote. “Today we welcome ‘Lady in Blue’ by Tschabalala Self – a symbol of confidence and purpose and an excellent addition to Trafalgar Square.”

BBC London went with the house style: “‘Everywoman’ statue unveiled in Trafalgar Square.” The replies under both posts filled up with the same words: eyesore, insult, not representative, politics not art.

Author Laura Dodsworth quoted the official announcement and kept it short.

Self has been consistent about the brief. “My work Lady In Blue will bring to Trafalgar Square a woman that many can relate to,” she said. “She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate. She is a woman walking forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner, who represents the city’s spirit.”

Self also said she wanted to “direct everyone’s attention to the future” because “I don’t think there are enough monuments that are about our shared future to come.”

To The Art Newspaper she added: “This is a contemporary representation of personhood. Women need to be understood as being persons. Black people need to be understood as being persons. Despite someone’s identity politics, they should be able to be understood as a representation of all human beings.”

Ok, but it doesn’t look very good, does it.

Deputy mayor for culture Justine Simons called it “not a remote historic figurehead but a tribute to everyday women.”

That is of course, only if you’re an obese black woman.

Commissioning group chair Ekow Eshun said the work “transforms the everyday into the monumental.”

Hmmmmm.

The surrounding square contains Nelson’s Column, Landseer lions, Admiralty Arch and the National Gallery. The plinth itself was built in 1841 for an equestrian statue of William IV that never arrived.

Since 1999 it has been reserved for rotating contemporary commissions funded by the Mayor of London, with support from Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

A Greater London Authority decision in 2024 approved more than £1 million of programme spending across 2024-27, covering the 2026 and 2028 commissions, schools awards and engagement. The artist’s fee on these commissions has previously been put at £30,000, with a larger production budget on top.

Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak looked at the maquette in 2024 and said “what you see is what it says on the tin,” adding that it “lacked originality.” Two years later the tin is five metres high and bolted into the ceremonial centre of the capital.

None of this is a surprise. The winner was announced in March 2024. The official language then was already the same: a “young, metropolitan woman of colour,” a “quotidian figure,” a figure designed to “embrace and confound collective fantasies and assumptions surrounding the Black female body.”

The Fourth Plinth is not a neutral empty shelf. It is the most watched public art slot in Britain, and City Hall has used it, commission after commission, to wag a ‘progressive’ finger at the square that used to commemorate a naval victory.

It is ugly on purpose. The bulk, the cartoon stride, the department-store jewellery – all of it is there to occupy the square in a brazen attempt to make Nelson look like an embarrassment. It’s a humiliation ritual.

The public was invited to “have its say” on the 2024 shortlist. More than 10,000 votes were recorded. The decision still sat with the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group. The Mayor approves the winner.

They didn’t install a sculpture. They installed a cheap catalogue figure in glamour heels, bolted onto the ceremonial heart of the capital, then force-fed to the public as “everywoman” by people who would call an actual English person on that plinth a hate crime.

The latest atrocity replaces Teresa Margolles’s Mil Veces un Instante, the transgender-faces installation that occupied the same stone for two years.

Of course it did.

In 2024 Sadiq Khan unveiled Margolles’s casts of 850 faces, sold as a monument to “marginalised” trans sex workers, after a YouGov poll found 23 percent of Londoners approved and 43 percent disliked it.

A statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II was pushed aside in favour of that.

Taxpayers covered a £170,000 bill. Khan said the work would “encourage discussion about the fight for freedom and equality.”

It didn’t.

Lady in Blue is not the end of the sequence. It is the middle. And if you think this one is bad, In 2028 It comes down and Andra Ursu?a’s Untitled goes up. The official description is a hollow, life-sized person on a horse, covered in a shroud, cast in translucent pale-green resin.

It’s a green blob.

City Hall says the rider and horse “will remain anonymous, their distinguishing features concealed under the folds that drape over them.” The work “hovers at the edge of visibility.” It is, the programme text continues, “a yet-to-be-uncovered or an already cancelled public monument. A ghost of history and a parody of itself.”

No, it’s a green blob.

That emptiness is the point they want you to swallow. The Fourth Plinth was built for an equestrian statue of William IV. The money ran out. Ursu?a’s ghost horse now arrives as a piss take of the monument that was supposed to stand there.

The programme calls it “an artifact of a hyperfragmented, paranoid time when public space, consensus, and community continue to dissolve.” It “aims to contain irreconcilable narratives without attempting to rewrite them.” It is, the text says, “an object that embodies radical acceptance of our deeply flawed present.”

Try to roll your eyes back into place.

They’ve approved a toxic-green Halloween prop on the plinth reserved for a king and wrote a nonsense thesis in the hope nobody will call it junk.

The order is locked in. Trans faces, then the fat black woman, then some ectoplasm.

Zoom out from the blue dress and the rest of Khan’s London clicks into place.

In 2021 the mayor appointed a Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm – a hand-picked panel of campaigners and cultural operators – to review statues, street names and memorials so the city’s monuments might be made to “reflect” a preferred history. Khan said the body was not there to pull statues down. He had already said “there are some slavers that should come down, and the commission will advise on that.” One appointee had previously vandalised a statue with red paint. Another had backed the toppling of Edward Colston.

This week the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination told Britain to fill public space with statues honouring “people of African descent,” rewrite schoolbooks around “reparatory justice,” and treat historic slavery as a live brief for speech and migration policy. Historians pointed out the obvious: Britain banned the trade, paid to dismantle it, and ran the West Africa Squadron that seized slaving ships. The UN document is not interested in that ledger. It wants the square.

While the new figure was being craned onto the plinth, the approaches to the same square were already lined with steel and concrete vehicle barriers. City Hall will not name the threat those blocks are built for. The public does. They went up because “vehicle as a weapon” attacks are now treated as a standing condition of British civic life. Nelson looks down on crash-rated steel. Diversity, we are told, is a strength. The furniture of the square says otherwise.

The same culture machine is now pushing Fabric, the nightclub brand chaired by the man who also chairs Khan’s Nightlife Taskforce, into St Paul’s Cathedral on a four-year “contemporary music” deal. Peregrine Hood of the Nelson Society asked the only question that matters: “Is nothing sacred any more?” Nelson is buried in that cathedral. His column stands a few hundred yards from the new plinth piece. The mayor’s culture team called the Fabric deal “an extraordinary and unexpected coming together of two very different parts of London.”

Even the stations have been enlisted. Transport for London dropped a pitched-roof “calm space” onto the concourse at Ealing Broadway this week and called it equity. Commuters called it a kennel. The network still cannot keep trains clean, cooled and on time. Fare evasion still bleeds nine figures a year. The pod got the press release.

Trafalgar Square was built to mark a country that won a famous battle for British values. The Fourth Plinth is now used to lecture that country and rub in our faces that our history is being erased and replaced one plinth at a time.