JUST 12 months after George Robertson’s much-acclaimed strategic defence review the overstretching of our armed forces is worse than ever

JUST 12 months after George Robertson’s much-acclaimed strategic defence review, the overstretching of our armed forces is worse than ever. As the lessons of Kosovo are taken on board, the Ministry of Defence has some hard choices to make. He is now a great hero of mine, and I still don’t know or care who his sculptor is.. For years, I used to walk down King Charles Street with, at one end, its statue massively inscribed CLIVE, and routinely joke that there ought to be another at the far end inscribed DEREK. But then one day I got bored of my own joke, and went and read a big fat book about the great man, and another, and another, and another.

Who knows, or cares, really, who sculpted the figure of Nelson? The point is that he is on a socking great column in the centre of London, and any child possessing the smallest curiosity will sooner or later want to know why. And that incitement to curiosity lasts throughout one’s life. A Damien Hirst in Trafalgar Square is inconceivable.The point of the statues in Trafalgar Square isn’t, exactly, to provide works of art for Londoners to admire, but to show them their heroes; figures in bronze to say hello to on the way to the office. And the best and most interesting sculptors in Britain couldn’t fill the empty plinth with their work. One is a grand and mystical monument; the other is there to remind us that, as Auden said, private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places. The other spectacularly successful statue of recent years is Maggi Hambling’s A Conversation with Oscar Wilde. It’s in a busy side-street off the Strand, and you never walk past without seeing someone pause to have a good look at it.But, like Wallinger’s statue of Christ, these are idiosyncratic works of art, unlike every other piece of London statuary.

Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North is a genuinely popular piece; it’s quickly attained the rare distinction of always being referred to without its creator’s name attached, as if it were The Winged Victory of Samothrace. And the idea of public art, it strikes me, is one to which most artists pay lip-service rather than feel committed. That doesn’t mean that no artist, these days, is able to create a successful piece of sculpture in a public space. If sculpture is one of the strongest aspects of British art since the war, it hasn’t had much to do with memorial statuary. Subsequent offerings are being prepared by Phil Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread – who is going to cast the plinth itself in transparent resin, you will not be surprised to hear.

The first, however, is a life-size statue of Christ by Mark Wallinger, that splendid metaphysician; a statue of Christ is a distinctly un-English idea, but this one is so poignant and tiny on the plinth, that it solves the problem by its obvious inadequacy.However, I wonder whether the whole thing is all a bit too late. Other candidates have either seemed too big, like Churchill brooding opposite the Houses of Parliament, or not quite secure enough in their reputation, like “Bomber” Harris or Captain Scott. It is widely assumed that, in the end, there will be an equestrian portrait of the Queen there but, since there is some kind of rule forbidding the portrayal of living members of the Royal Family, that isn’t going to be for decades.Anyway, a committee has been set up to ponder the issue but, before coming to a permanent solution, it has invited three leading young contemporary artists to place a statue there for a year. Nobody could argue with Nelson’s presence in the square, but the three occupied plinths have a slightly rag-bag air.