Climate protesters throw soup at a Van Gough painting at the National Gallery and people are outraged.
Understandably so in a sense, although when the noise dies down the young Just Stop Oil agitators sound calmly sensible, saying they knew the painting was covered in glass (more than I did), and therefore wouldn’t be harmed, adding: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet?”
Suddenly, the people throwing soup seem more reasonable than the right-wing politicians fulminating about people throwing soup.
Other anti-oil protesters glue themselves to roads and also generate shouty condemnation from government politicians. Sure, it’s annoying to have your commute disrupted, but having the planet disrupted is possibly a more serious annoyance.
Suddenly the people gluing themselves to tarmac seem more reasonable than the politicians shouting at them.
Do you remember the protesters who obstructed traffic a year ago because they wanted the government to insulate homes? Those crazy eco-hotheads with their outrageous demands.
Yet if only the government had listened and acted, rather than sending out someone or other with foam on their lips, whoever had fabricated fury to spare that day, perhaps a few more homes would have been insulated in time for the energy crisis.
It’s hard to say if throwing soup at paintings changes anything. To this big eater of soup, it does rather seem a waste, but such actions do raise important matters that mainstream politics seems unable to do much about.
And no action taken by these protesters sounds as ludicrously daft as Suella Braverman, who is the actual Home Secretary (heaven help us all), turning on them in the House of Commons with her now notorious anti-tofu tirade. Let me entertain/horrify you with the following extract…
“I’m afraid it’s the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, it’s the Coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, Tofu-eating, wokerati, dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”
Yes, the blameless bean curd – not the sticky stuff that threatens your fillings. Braverman kept away from the toffee-sucking classes, perhaps because some of them might be old Tories. Pro-toffee, anti-tofu.
Look, I’m not much of a tofu-eater so the insult passed me by. But what a weirdo the Home Secretary seems to be, having earlier said it was her “dream” to send migrants to Rwanda. My dream is that we see the back of Tory politicians who think that passing round a bag of stale culture wars fudge is enough to impress voters. But maybe it will be, as you ever can be sure.
And all of this is without even mentioning the self-inflicted woes of work experience prime minister Liz Truss. Is she still in charge? I haven’t checked for ten minutes, so who knows. The new chancellor who replaced the one who had to go after three weeks seems to have the authority now, and when you find yourself saying that of Jeremy Hunt, you know that politics really has gone weird.
Yes, the same Jeremy Hunt who wrecked the NHS and flopped badly in the Tory leadership race, going out in the first round. How refreshing to know that losers can be winners; and winners can be hopeless zealots with a head full of crazy libertarian dreams that crash the economy and turn Britain into a Brexit-buggered basket case.
Will the Tories continue to implode in this spectacular manner, while ludicrously trying to claim they alone know how to run the economy; will Labour manage to stay so far ahead in the polls (unlikely as, however welcome, it’s not exactly an earned lead, more of by-product of that implosion).
Oh, who knows? A week used to be a long time in politics; now it’s practically an historical era.