Helen Cammock removes film criticising Winston Churchill from London's National Portrait Gallery following complaint

Turner Prize–winning artist Helen Cammock has withdrawn her 40-minute film Persistence from London’s National Portrait Gallery after complaints about its criticism of Winston Churchill. The work, on temporary display since September 2025 in the exhibition Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture (due to end in August), referenced “the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Churchill” during the 1943 Bengal famine. A letter to the NPG’s interim chair of trustees, Shearer West, signed by more than 50 members of the House of Lords—including Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames and historian Andrew Roberts—denounced the claim as historically inaccurate and said it risked the gallery’s reputation. The NPG said trustees were kept informed but did not discuss the withdrawal as a board; the Bengal famine, which killed an estimated three million people, remains a subject of historical debate.

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