There are nine people alive who have been prime minister of Britain - eight of whom served substantive terms if you discount Liz Truss.
Aside from the fact that they have all led the government, one other thing unites John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and, now, Keir Starmer; all support the building of a new Holocaust memorial and education centre in a pretty park next to the Houses of Parliament.
But while the proposal unites almost all current and former occupants of 10 Downing Street, the £200 million (€240 million) scheme, planned for the riverside Victoria Tower gardens, divides pretty much everybody else in Westminster, wider London and even many of Britain’s Jewish community.
The proposed memorial, comprising 23 huge bronze fins rising 10m above the turf, is dismissed by its critics as a giant “toast rack” that will obscure the view of the Palace of Westminster and eat up much of the popular garden’s green space. They also say it brings an increased risk of terrorism.
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The memorial’s proponents say putting it next door to the bastion of British democracy sends a powerful message that the catastrophe of more than 80 years ago must never be let happen again.
Meanwhile, the near decade-old row rumbles on.
Starmer, who led Labour back to power last July, is not a Jew but he is married to one; his low-profile wife, Victoria Starmer, was born into a Jewish family and she sometimes attends a liberal synagogue in north London along with her husband and their children.
Earlier this month, the prime minister and his wife travelled to Poland where they visited Auschwitz, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps, which was liberated 80 years ago this week. The couple visited Block 27, where they looked for members of Victoria Starmer’s family in the Book of Names.
“It was harrowing,” the prime minister recalled on Monday of this week.
“We turned page after page after page just to find the first letter of a name. It gave me an overwhelming sense of the sheer scale of this industrialised murder. And every one of those names . . . was an individual person. Someone’s mother, father, brother, sister – brutally murdered simply because they were Jewish.”
More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, alongside a further five million non-Jews such as Gypsies, Slavs, communists and gay people.
When he stood at the dais of the House of Commons a week ago for prime minister’s questions, Starmer insisted his recent Auschwitz experience had only strengthened his resolve to “build a national memorial and learning centre beside this parliament” in the garden that is his wife’s namesake, and where opponents of the project have opposed it at every turn since 2016.
Cameron first mooted the Holocaust memorial almost 12 years ago and appointed a commission to find a site. It settled on Victoria Tower Gardens in 2015 and Cameron set the plan in motion the following year. It was originally budgeted for £50 million but the estimated cost has quadrupled since.
May – publicly backed by Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron − increased its funding. The controversial final design of the memorial, with its fins funnelling visitors downstairs to the subterranean learning centre, was also decided during her premiership.
Johnson’s government tried to push it through the planning process, but was stymied in the courts as it fell foul of a 120-year old law banning construction in Victoria Tower Gardens.
Sunak introduced the Holocaust Memorial Bill to overturn this law and revive the plan, but he ran out of time before last July’s election. Finally, Starmer won power last year and promised to push the Bill through.
It passed select committee stage in the House of Lords earlier this month and is now at an advanced stage in the upper chamber. With Labour and the Tories united on it, it seems inevitable it will became law sometime in the second half of this year. Then the scheme will go back to planning.
Some of the memorial’s critics want it moved away from parliament and co-located instead with the Jewish museum on Finchley Road in north London. Ruth Deech, a Jewish woman and cross-bench peer, said placing it in this context made more sense than an isolated commemoration of disaster in a garden in Westminster.
“We need to teach people about Jewish life, not just about Jewish death,” she said.
Cameron, meanwhile, told a recent debate in the Lords that the proposed memorial in the heart of British democracy was “the right idea, in the right place, at the right time”. As its original backer, he said he sometimes felt like “the father of an unloved child”.
Cameron said if positioning a memorial of the slaughter of Jews so close to parliament brought an increased risk of terrorism, that proved “why we need to do it so badly”.
