Yard bans protest boats from London
EXTINCTION Rebellion boats were banned from London yesterday after the Metropolitan Police imposed a new condition on the climate change protests.
Environmentalists have been demonstrating in cities all week – and a staple for their processions have been full-size boats, seemingly to maximise disruption.
The Met had to provide evidence that these demonstrations may have resulted in disruption to communities in the capital and, having done so, at 7.40am yesterday the force had the condition granted.
It read, under Section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986, that: “No boat, vehicle or other structure may form part of any procession by ‘Extinction Rebellion’ or join the procession at any point on its route or at its final location on Friday, 19 July 2019 within the London region.”
Having been in Glasgow, Leeds, Bristol and Cardiff this week, another march in London was planned for yesterday. It resulted in Westminster Bridge being closed as protesters blocked the road. It was only reopened when the protesters moved on to Parliament Square.
into church. He is also the vicar of Holy Trinity, Brompton, in London, which counts among its alumni Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Grylls and Gumbel remain close, though he is not a member of his congregation. “I do go to HTB [as it is known] a few times during the year,” he says, “but mainly to have lunch with Nicky before or after. I don’t feel I have ever been a fully fledged member of any church. Having said that, I have observed his church from the sidelines for 20 years, and I think he runs an outward-facing, lovely church, full of love and acceptance.”
There have been some criticisms of HTB – for being a church-within-achurch in Anglicanism, cult-like, even, and for attracting mainly well-heeled young people. “All places have flaws,” Grylls reflects, “but Nicky’s leadership is rooted in humility. You see some church leaders and it becomes all
about them, and their wealth, their buildings, if you’re this or that. Nicky has never been like that.”
Grylls, you may have gathered, is not someone who feels the need to channel his own faith through denominations or institutions. And that is very much the spirit of Soul Fuel.
The text is based on a regular exchange he has about God with an old and close friend, Jim Hawkins, a schoolteacher. “I miss the friendship and vulnerability of having an accountable buddy to share life things with on a deeper level than catching up for a beer,” he says.
“With Jim, I’ve done a daily thing for many years – reading the Bible together and then emailing thoughts and some feeling and some struggles. Just short, 10 minutes.”
It is so important to him that he keeps it up even in the remotest parts of the world. “We do it absolutely every single day. If I know I am going to be out of comms for a few days, I’ll bank them up and send them.”
In one of the entries, Grylls writes that the “perfect love of God” casts out fear. Is his faith the hidden force that makes him so fearless on screen?
“I have plenty of fear,” he corrects me. “I feel fear every day, but I’ve learnt two things – one, that that is OK; and two, that being brave isn’t the absence of fear.” And he feels braver, he isn’t afraid to admit, when he says a prayer – “when I say, ‘will you be beside me in this moment?’ My boys joke about me always going on about ‘God-confidence’, not selfconfidence.”
“God-confidence” isn’t, he stresses, a cast-iron belief that he will always be safe. “Someone asked me recently, was I praying when my parachute wasn’t opening [in an accident in Kenya in 1997 that ended his SAS career]? Of course, I wasn’t. I was saying, ‘F---, open!’ If I’d answered with some platitude, that would have been Christian bull----. That,” he protests, “is what puts people off Christians.”
‘My boys joke about me going on about “God-confidence”, not self-confidence’