A painting by Banksy showing the House of Commons overrun with chimpanzees has sold at auction for just under £9.9m.
The 4m (13ft) wide artwork, the artist’s biggest known work on canvas, is known as ‘Devolved Parliament’ and was painted in 2009.
Expected to fetch between £1.5m and £2m, it sold for nearly five times its estimate at Sotheby’s in London.
Banksy reacted on Instagram, saying it was a “record price for a Banksy painting” and “shame I didn’t still own it.”
Sotheby’s tweeted the painting had sold “to applause at £9,879,500 – nine times its previous record – after a 13 minute bidding battle.”
The auction house said: “Regardless of where you sit in the Brexit debate, there’s no doubt that this work is more pertinent now than it has ever been.”
It beat the previous auction record for a Banksy, thought to be the $1.8m (£1.4m) for Keep It Spotless, which sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2008.
Alex Branczik, from Sotheby’s, said Banksy “confronted the burning issues of the day”.
He said the artist “distils society’s most complicated political situations into just one, deceptively simple image that is readily shareable in our social media age.”
