Surrounded by Extinction Rebellion in Whitehall, Boris invokes Margaret Thatcher

As if Londoners did not already suffer enough from traffic delays and pollution, they are now grappling with yet another Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest. This one has already paralysed

much of Westminster and, if it succeeds, will doubtless spread across the capital. 

Police are better prepared than they were for the last demonstrations in April, but XR has responded to hundreds of arrests of its supporters and the confiscation of its equipment by calling

for reinforcements. XR is less than a year old, but has already morphed from a spontaneous protest to a sophisticated and wealthy organisation. 

Millions have laughed at online videos of their attempt to spray the Treasury with red paint, or “fake blood”, accompanied by a Benny Hill soundtrack. The protestors’ inability to control

their fire engine’s pressure hose turned their stunt into a fiasco, but it would be foolish to underestimate XR’s determination. The fact that they can make a global impact with impunity at

the heart of the British state is in itself a triumph for their guerilla tactics. The Metropolitan Police have used minimum force to keep the peace. XR is already the most successful

environmental movement in history — and they know it.

Not everyone sympathises with XR’s conduct, however. Londoners going about their business, children going to school, tourists on the trip of a lifetime: millions of ordinary people doing

ordinary things naturally resent the temporary curtailing of their liberties. Whatever they may think of the protest’s demand for the Government to declare a “climate emergency”, imposing

draconian policies to render Britain “carbon neutral” by 2025, many of those directly affected will feel that XR has delighted us long enough.

That was certainly the mood at the Banqueting House in Whitehall last night. Outside, XR activists were camping out in front of Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence. Inside, a

glittering array of politicians, journalists and assorted veterans of the 1980s were gathered beneath the ceiling frescoes of Rubens to celebrate the publication of Herself Alone, the third

and final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher. For once, the cliché was apposite: this trilogy really is monumental, but also compulsively readable. Moore’s Thatcher

deserves to be to political biography what Boswell’s Life of Johnson is to literary biography: a standard never to be surpassed.

Appropriately enough, the present incumbent of Number 10 was there to pay tribute to the author, who had once been his Editor at the Daily Telegraph. Surrounded by old friends and

colleagues, Boris Johnson was in his element and his speech — which he was, true to form, still scribbling at the last minute — did not disappoint. 

Rightly, he praised the book as not only a great work of modern history, but a great work of literature too. He recalled one of his few encounters with its subject, by which time he was

Mayor of London and she was in the grip of Alzheimer’s. “You need to get rid of that awful Ken Livingstone,” she told him. He already had.

Boris would not be Boris, however, if he did not seize the opportunity to make political capital. His security staff had warned him against attending this event, he said, for fear that he

would be “egged” en route. He only needed to ask himself what the Iron Lady would have said. A Prime Minister who was not afraid to send a task force around the world to retake the Falklands

would hardly have been prevented from crossing the street by a few “crusties”, he observed. 

Warming to his theme, Boris used Mrs Thatcher to turn the tables on XR: “I hope that when we are waylaid by importunate ring-nosed climate change protestors, we remind them that she was also

right about greenhouse gases and that she took it seriously long before Greta Thunberg. The best thing possible for the education of the denizens of the heaving hemp-filled bivouacs that

now litter Hyde Park would be for them to buy a copy of Charles’s magnificent book so they can read about a green feminist who changed the world for the better.”

Outside the Banqueting Hall, the bedraggled devotees of XR were chanting slogans while holding hands in the drizzle. One may not go along with Boris Johnson’s gentle mockery, but there is no

denying that Margaret Thatcher was the first world leader to sound the alarm about the potential threat to the climate posed by greenhouse gases. We can also agree that, whether you are a

commuter enduring gridlock caused by protests, a police officer patiently refusing to be provoked, or even a young, idealistic demonstrator being “kettled”, it does help to keep one’s sense

of humour.

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