I don’t mind do-gooders – it’s the view-gooders I loathe

Say what you like about plagues, they do have a habit of putting things into perspective, bringing with them a whole new cast of characters. Every time Rishi waves another goody-bag in our direction or Professor Karol Sikora tweets us to keep calm and carry on, I get a lovely snuggly feeling – and feel extremely pleased that Gina Miller and Steve Bray (the Hinge and Bracket of Brexit) are no longer delighting us with their presence.

To a hardcore democrat like me, to whom the will of the people is all-important, they were certainly irritants – but they weren’t all bad, in that every time Bray was heard bawling “STOP BREXIT!” or Miller screwed up her attractive face as though she had smelt something unspeakably vulgar, I felt glee in the knowledge that should we ever be forced into another referendum, they had surely pushed another fencesitter on to our side.

If I had to choose which I loathed more, I suppose there was an element of pity in my antipathy for Bray. Whereas it took an extremely expensive education to make Gina

Miller that tone-deaf to public opinion, to the point that I am afraid I often muttered “Don’t you have some servants to go and shout at?” whenever I saw her scowling about democracy on television.

I thought of her last week when a survey of those involved in the two major London Extinction Rebellion demonstrations last year revealed that 64 per cent were women and a whopping 85 per cent had degrees.

In these days when racial diversity is quite rightly prized in all arenas, I’d have liked to know the ethnic make-up too, but suffice to say I’ve “never seen so many white people in one place” since Jon Snow was snowblinded by that Brexit rally last year. But then climate protests generally make Last Night of the Proms look like the Reggae Sunsplash festival.

Furthermore, three-quarters were southern, a high proportion were self-employed and part-time workers and two-thirds identified as middle-class. (The remaining third were probably so posh they couldn’t understand the researcher’s non-U accent.)

For some reason, I find this crew a lot more annoying than the Black Lives Matter activists. Yes, BLM may have its fair quota of halfwits who believe that Covid-19 doesn’t count if you’re playing Sardines for a good cause – but at least they’re outand-out old-fashioned angry about something. The XR protesters, on the other hand, seem to be having a blissful time making life difficult for the less fortunate.

When old-fashioned snobbishness meets newfangled virtue-signalling, the result is revolting. Being angry, as BLM has proved, often gets results – but being patronising sends you to the back of the queue because nobody likes a Hyacinth Bucket.

There’s nothing wrong with being a do-gooder; once, these women might have done sterling work organising Meals On Wheels, but why juggle hotpot all day when you could get your picture in the paper for saving the planet?

In reality they are less do-gooders, more view-gooders, desperate to be seen as the better person by the rest of us. It’s no coincidence that so many professional performers are fans, jetting in to show their support by planting a dirty great carbon footprint on Mother Earth’s jacksy.

Somehow you can’t see them getting aerated about issues that involve people in peril – real, imperfect, planet-polluting people – such as modern slavery. No, they’re Friends of the Earth because it’s been such a good friend to them; NIMBYS on a global scale, of course they want their stage to be in good shape for their frolics – the XR honcho who huffed out of a radio interview when confronted with his own jet-setting Instagram account was typical.

Still, pity the poor posh protester. They haven’t had a good plague; the family-friendly festivals are on hold and they’ll miss their annual beano bringing the capital to a standstill – you can tell they’d be very keen on social distancing, what with them being so special. But worst of all, Cath Kidston closed down all its stores in April – now they’ve really got something to cry about.