This picture makes me want to take up archery as a hobby. I wish I knew why.

So it’s a beautiful thing when a man whose hateful vision extended to disfiguring a whole continent is rewarded with the eternal recognition that fleeting visits to garden parties cannot guarantee. Westminster City Council has granted planning permission to cast the likeness of war criminal, state terrorist and crucifier of Central America, Ronald Reagan, in bronze, possibly because wooden spoons make for rather rickety statues. It will be erected on Grosvenor Square outside an American Embassy that, the last time I heard, was moving location anyway. Maybe the nearby Canadian embassy will have some use for it. The council has even been prepared to waive established rules that normally delay such memorials until ten years has elapsed since the death of the selected hagiographical study so that his pal Margaret Thatcher can turn up for its unveiling. On that day irony will scream almost as loud as those in the torture chambers of the Saudis and Baathists he had for allies, as the statue of the man behind Star Wars is planted opposite one of Dwight D. Eisenhower, best known for leaving office with warnings about the military industrial complex.

Ranking evil is often a fatuous task, but the respective legacies that these two will leave on the world makes for a most one-sided comparison. Nick Griffin’s henchmen pass their time smashing windows, recreating '300' by wrestling Asians in car parks and daubing BNP slogans on the inside of toilet cubicles. A few corpulent BNPers literally fill seats on local councils but the party is small fry and its crimes small scale. The police can deal with them. As for Reagan, well he may not have been a beer-gutted street brawling xenophobe with an aura of piss and scotch eggs, but he was in much greater need of a spell in jail. Pick a lousy government outside the Soviet bloc on any continent and he was ready to support and fund their evils. Pinochet’s Chile, Mobotu’s ‘Zaire’, Saddam’s Iraq, Ceausescu’s Romania, Suharto’s Indonesia, the list is long. He also sought to undermine democracy if he didn’t like it, exposing Nicaraguans to a decade long terrorist insurgency until its revolutionary government’s social programmes caved in and a frightened population voted them out of power. As Libyan civilians found out, he was quite prepared to drop his own bombs too. And while Reagan was no BNP racist, his refusal to give up continued support of South Africa’s Apartheid government stank more than all the shit BNP activists have ever posted through the letterboxes of designated ethnic undesirables combined.

This guy was not a particularly great friend of Britain, only its wrecking ball Prime Minister. He backed the Argentine junta until they farted in the jacuzzi with their Falklands invasion. Only then was he forced to choose between prized allies, picking Thatcher’s Britain despite his prized ideologue, Jeane Kirkpatrick, recommending that they stay close to the mutilators and abductors in Buenos Aires. He even managed to ruffle his relationship with Thatcher by needlessly invading Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth. Never mind, Steve Summers, the chairman of Westminster City Council's planning applications subcommittee, believes that "Regardless of politics, nobody can dispute that President Reagan was a true ally of this country”, a defence that anyone in bed with the mafia might cleave to, but nobody in search of genuine justice.

While BNP members have beaten people black and blue, Reagan’s legacy is blood red. If you want a statue of Reagan because he contributed to the USSR buckling then you may as well stick an icon of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps brandishing a Stinger missile, outside the embassy. British soldiers are being dispatched to clean up and die for both men’s mess. Still, once it’s built we can re-enact the Cold War and tear the damn thing down.

Reagan and Suharto, who proved that you could get away with anything if you were anti-Communist