FARMER SPRAYS MANURE AT LUVVIE EMMA
SHE had meant it to be a Bake Offinspired demonstration against fracking. But Emma Thompson suddenly found her protest had an unexpected extra ingredient yesterday.
For as the Leftie luvvie led a Greenpeace group in the stunt on a site earmarked for fracking, an irate farmer – believed to be the landowner – sprayed them with manure.
The stunt began with Miss Thompson, 57, and other anti-fracking activists being filmed climbing over a padlocked gate, contravening a High Court injunction obtained by energy firm Cuadrilla barring the public from entering the site near Preston which it wants to use for shale gas exploration.
The actress and her sister Sophie, who won Celebrity Masterchef two years ago and now writes cookery books, then took part in ‘The Frack Free Bake Off’ – a parody of The Great British Bake Off – in a marquee. They baked energy-themed confections in the woodfired, solar-powered kitchen, with Oscar-winner Miss Thompson creating a wind turbine cake and her sister, 54, a solar lemon cake.
But a tractor pulling a muckspreader arrived on the scene and sprayed activists with slurry. Mother-of-two Miss Thompson, whose public protests and rants in recent years have irked many, escaped unscathed.
So did her sister – but videos showed other activists being hit by a stream of sewage.
Sources said the tractor was driven by the farmer who leases the land to Cuadrilla. Lancashire Police said officers attended ‘for safety reasons’ and no arrests were made.
Miss Thompson has recently been involved in high-profile environmental and tax avoid- ance protests. Last month she entered the debate over the EU, siding with the Remain campaign and branding Britain ‘tiny’, ‘cakefilled’ and ‘misery-laden’.
She said yesterday’s stunt was to draw attention to the way the Government had slipped out an announcement giving permis- sion for fracking in 159 new areas. Her sister added: ‘The Government has rigged the competition undemocratically to favour the fracking industry. If our Government energy policy were a cake, it would probably be a cross between a crumble and an Eton mess.’
But Ken Cronin, chief executive of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, said it was ‘ironic that Sophie Thompson, who uses gas stoves in videos to promote her own cook books, and her sister, who described Britain as “a cakefilled misery-laden grey old island”, should want to attempt to hijack the UK’s love of baking for an ill-conceived publicity stunt’.