I ventured out into Westminster earlier this week to take a look at the Extinction Rebellion protest and it reminded me of the Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t just mean the sheer number of people in fancy dress, such as the Red Rebels with their red robes and white face paint, or the men in gas masks. I mean it was like a huge piece of political street theatre written by a brilliant satirist.
Wherever you looked there were little comic vignettes. At one point, having become slightly numb listening to one activist after another condemn ‘western consumerism’, I popped into Pret a Manger, only to be confronted by protestors politely queuing up to buy vegan baguettes. I could have sworn some of them were the very same people who’d been holding up signs saying ‘End Capitalism’ moments before. Then there was the hearse parked in Trafalgar Square, complete with a coffin in the back labelled ‘Our Future’, which immediately got a parking ticket.
Apart from that over-zealous traffic warden, the reaction of the authorities was a model of restraint. At first I found the police’s failure to enforce the law irritating — I joked to James Delingpole that if it were a group of Catholic nuns protesting about changes to the Gender Recognition Act, the riot squad would have been straight in with the tear gas. But I came around to this policy as the day wore on. Rather than turn the demonstrators into martyrs by arresting them en masse and dragging them into paddy wagons, the police stood back for the most part and let them make fools of themselves.
On the day I was there, first prize went to Mark Rylance, who gave a speech saying he’d been inspired to resign from the Royal Shakespeare Company by Greta Thunberg.
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