It’s not just Bristol (and London as Sadiq Khan has discovered) that have the wrong statues. Manchester is full of them. First of all, the most glaring anomaly, is that in a city that prides itself as one of the most left-wing in the country there are more statues of Tories than socialists: 3–2 at the last count.

Funnily enough the people, yes, you the people, are to blame for this in one respect. When the public was asked a few years ago to choose a new statue that had to be of a woman, under-represented in the city’s statuary, there was huge support for Emmeline Pankhurst at the expense of her more deserving daughter, Sylvia. It was hardly surprising; the public are force-fed a regular diet of the wonders of Emmeline while teachers, journalists and broadcast presenters ignore Sylvia. Result: everyone knows about Emmeline and her good deeds, so people are bound to vote for her, while Sylvia remains obscure.

Another quirk of the city’s statues is that those in powerful positions in Manchester don’t seem to know which statues we have on offer. For instance, when the council first raised the idea a few years of commissioning a new statue of a woman the Evening News ran story after story claiming that there was only one statue of a woman – Queen Victoria, forgetting that there are quite a few to her name in Manchester. When I pointed out that Queen Elizabeth who stands proudly at the front of the Town Hall was probably a woman I was told it wasn’t a proper statue. No, probably a hologram.