There are two Englishmen it is considered socially unacceptable to criticise. David Attenborough has the status of a living god and seems like a nice man. I find his stuff unwatchable because of the music, but that is my problem.

Winston Churchill is the other one.

Artist Helen Cammock made the mistake of referring to his role in the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which an estimated three million people died. From the coverage in the right wing press you would think that she had desecrated his grave and animated a video of him doing unspeakable things to a goat.

I was so intrigued by the outrage that I went to see her video installation Persistence at the National Portrait Gallery. It is sponsored by the Chanel Culture Fund, that’s the same Chanel that makes fancy perfumes and things, so you would not be expecting anything overly radical. Churchill’s nephew describes the work as an “ideologically motivated rant” and others call it “a barefaced lie”.

As a connoisseur and frequent practitioner of ideologically motivated rants, I had to say I was disappointed.  She did not say that he personally killed any of them with his own hands. She neglected to mention that he was an enthusiastic advocate of imperialist butchery throughout his life. At the age of 21 he fought alongside Spanish troops against Cuban rebels; he saw active service in India; he actively participated in Kitchener’s slaughter in Sudan; as a member of the war cabinet, he was instrumental in organising the starvation of German civilians in World War One.

Not only that – she broke the first rule of ranting by speaking throughout in a calm measured voice. She compounded the error by breaking the second rule by only referring to Churchill once and fleetingly. Her only reference to him was “Cromwell starved people, en masse, a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill.” This observation was made following a reflection on Cromwell’s death mask, how he is taught to English children and how Irish people see him rather differently.

Cammock’s essential observation was that British imperialism has been willing to let large numbers of people die and she didn’t even mention the Famine. She did however refer to Netanyahu’s deliberate starvation of Gaza, though without citing the British and American governments’ role in facilitating it. The video might be many things, but it is not an ideological rant.

The National Portrait Gallery has acres of walls covered in images of thieves, murderers, parasites who, in a less imperfect world, would have received rough justice from plebeian mobs. Cammock, by interrogating what gives people their status in life, art and society was reacting against that in a more constructive way than I could. In doing so she has annoyed several reactionary posh people and their servants in the right-wing press. That is a good thing.

With a bit of luck, the confected outrage will send her a few more viewers.