Unless you were a commuter struggling to reach work last week in London, the antics of Extinction Rebellion were comedy gold. If the world really is in imminent danger, as the activists tell us, then at least we’ll go down laughing.
I’m not sure what gave me most entertainment. The giant yoga session, maybe, or the activists dancing across Waterloo bridge, although it looked less like dancing and more like a troupe of crusties trying to ward off a swarm of wasps. Then there was the side-splitting interview on Sky News with Robin Boardman-Pattison, the 21-year-old Extinction spokesman (and jet-setting skier), who threw a hissy fit when Adam Boulton suggested he and his pals were “incompetent, middle-class, self-indulgent people”.
But what tickled my ribs particularly was the quartet of impeccably polite protestors who glued themselves to Jeremy Corbyn’s garden fence. They had with them some chocolates in a paper bag marked “Jeremy’s love hamper” but the leader of the opposition not only declined the gift he didn’t even deign to talk to the activists, a snub that apparently left them “tearful”.
This was no youthful protest staged by spotty students who’d skipped lectures for the day.
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