17:51

Fact-check: did Obama really remove a Churchill bust from the Oval Office?

Churchill. Composite: AP, Corbis, Reuters, PA, GC Images, Corbis, Rex

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has claimed that shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.

Writing on Friday for the Sun, a right-leaning British tabloid, Johnson attacked“the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire” in an article urging Britons to leave the European Union when given the choice in a referendum to be held in June.

The US president landed in London late on Thursday night as part of a trip to encourage Brits to stay in the union.

The claim that Obama discarded a Churchill bust is not new. In 2012, rumors circulated of an undiplomatic redecorating, prompting the White House to publish a blogpost titled Fact Check: The Bust of Winston Churchill, which claimed: “This is 100% false. The bust still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room.”

So, has Boris Johnson got his facts wrong? The answer is a little more complicated.

The bust in question, by British sculptor Jacob Epstein, was given to President George W Bush by the British government in 2001 and was placed in the Oval Office. But the statue was not donated, it was simply on loan for Bush’s term in office (a loan which the British government decided to extend when Bush was re-elected in 2004). Churchill disappeared from the White House in 2009, when the loan ended at the same time that Obama moved in.