The Attorney General’s office said it would consider any submission from the CPS very carefully, although it stressed it did not have power to affect the outcome of the case or order a retrial.

In a similar move in 2020, the Court of Appeal backed Ms Braverman when she said it was not necessary in a sexual assault for the prosecution to prove an offender’s intent was sexual. The defendant who forcibly kissed the woman was acquitted after claiming his intent was not sexual.

Marvin Rees, Bristol’s mayor, has warned protesters that his city was not for people to “indulge your own fantasies of being a revolutionary”, as the Government claimed its proposed new laws would deter people from similar attacks on statues and memorials.

Mr Rees, the UK’s first black mayor, said: “This isn’t the place to come to do criminal damage, come and smash police stations and all the rest of it.

“What’s difficult about this discussion is there are lots of people who are trying to use this opportunity to portray themselves in a way they want to portray and actually come up with very simplistic binary categories in a very complex situation.

“The simplistic thing that people are trying to push here is that somehow they – the people that pulled down a statue – are the embodiment of anti-racism, and everything that didn’t support them in the way that they say they should have been supporting are pro the status quo. I’d say it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

‘People can not just go around and cause vandalism’

Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, claimed proposed new laws for sentences of up to 10 years for criminal damage to memorials would close a potential loophole to ensure people could not “just go around and cause vandalism, destroy the public realm, and then essentially not be prosecuted”.

At the moment, offenders who cause less than £5,000 of damage only face a maximum of three months in jail.

The new Bill would allow the courts to consider the “emotional or wider distress” caused by damage to public property, raising the maximum sentence to 10 years – regardless of the costs incurred.

Boris Johnson said on Thursday that people should not “go around seeking retrospectively to change our history”. 

He added: “My feeling is that we have a complex historical legacy all around us, and it reflects our history in all its diversity, for good or ill.

“What you can’t do is go around seeking retrospectively to change our history or to bowdlerise it or edit it in retrospect. It’s like some person trying to edit their Wikipedia entry – it’s wrong.

“And I think if people democratically want to remove a statue or whatever, that’s fine. But I think that, in general, we should preserve our cultural, artistic, historical legacy – that’s my view.”