When two inebriated RAF engineers broke a Paddington statue in half in Newbury earlier this month, they could not have predicted the scale of the reaction. But in the UK of 2025, a crime against Paddington is not simply an act of drunken vandalism, but an egregious offence against whichever collection of buzzwords is today being defined as ‘British values’.
As the sentencing magistrate declared on Tuesday, Paddington ‘represents kindness, tolerance, and promotes integration and acceptance in our society’. The actions of the airmen ‘were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.’ The pair have been ordered to carry out unpaid work and pay £2,725 each to cover the cost of repairs – enough to buy a fair few marmalade sandwiches.
Readers might well feel that this punishment was too good for the misbehaving duo. But Mr Steerpike must admit that he is something of a Paddington-sceptic, especially when he found out how exactly the young ursus made his way to the Berkshire town of Michael Bond’s birth in the first place. Was the statue commissioned by the town itself as a spotaneous celebration of it’s favourite son? Had the Paddington statue been a fixture of Newbury for many years?
Not quite. It was only unveiled last October, as part of ‘Paddington Visits’ – a trail of similar statues across the UK and Ireland to drum up publicity for the release of the children’s blockbuster, Paddington in Peru. Newbury was one of 23 locations chosen by Studiocanal in their quest to flog cinema tickets for their latest animated cashgrab. None of which justifies vandalism, of course. But it did seem to have been missed by the judge that the pair were, essentially, in the words of a fellow traveller of Mr S, ‘fined £5k for defiling a 3D billboard’.
A hard burden to bear indeed.
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