Sarah Vine

THERE is more than a touch of the Prince harrys about Dr Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of extinction rebellion, the middle-class eco-worrier movement currently reducing swathes of the capital to a standstill via the medium of, among other horrors, interpretive dance.

Like harry, Bradbrook is passionate about climate change. Also like harry, she seems to subscribe to a ‘Do what I say not what I do’ school of activism. While harry hops home to California from the polo in Colorado on a mate’s private jet, Ms Bradbrook ferries her kids to rugger and football in a diesel car — the worstoffending kind of vehicle in terms of emissions.

her excuse is that she can’t afford an electric car — and that there are no buses available where she lives on a Sunday. A plight one would not be entirely unsympathetic towards — were it not for the fact that she and her followers are busy making life a misery for countless ordinary people who don’t have the luxury of being able to take a fortnight off work to dress up as shamans and play the bongos in Covent Garden.

ALSO like harry, Dr Bradbrook likes to take exotic holidays which require longhaul flights: in 2016, she flew 11,000 miles to Costa rica. Apparently, this was necessary for health reasons. The health of whom, one wonders? Certainly not her beloved planet earth.

To be honest, though, bad as it is, the hypocrisy isn’t even the worst of it. extinction rebellion are, in many respects, the perfect example of a ‘first world’ protest movement. Many come from a place of privilege. one so innate they’re not even aware of it.

This is not only brought into sharp relief by the seemingly infinite number of girls called Chloe with cut-glass accents gushing excitedly about ‘climate emergency, yah’ as though it were a new type of designer handbag while gluing themselves to the railings outside daddy’s office in the City, but in recent days far more poignantly, by contrast to a more immediate ‘emergency’ unfolding before our very eyes in Afghanistan.

While Bradbrook and her chums waste everyone’s time and money staging their tedious interventions, waving their dreamcatchers and subjecting us all to their terrible dad-dancing, thousands of women and children are facing the grimmest imaginable fate at the hands of the Taliban.

For many of us, watching the unfolding nightmare has put so many of our own petty daily concerns into perspective.

Against such a backdrop, the antics of Xr seem not only puerile, but also utterly misplaced.

For a start, they’re preaching to the converted. Britain has long been at the forefront of dealing with climate change, even though we already have some of the lowest rates of pollution in the world.

But then the truth is the future of the planet is not really why Xr stage their stunts. If it were, they would not be targeting Trafalgar Square or harassing civil servants. They would be camped outside the Chinese embassy, or picketing officials in Bejing, trying to persuade the world’s single largest producer of greenhouse gases — 27 per cent — to scale back.

But they’re never going to do that because . . . well, I doubt whether Dr Bradbrook or any of the lovely Chloes would have the stomach for a Chinese jail.

No, Xr do what they do because they’re a group of virtue-signalling, attention-seeking busybodies with nothing better to do all day than harass people who actually have to work for a living.

The fact that the country — and the authorities — tolerate them with such good humour is yet another reminder of what a civilised place Britain really is and how lucky we are to live here.