How I Destroyed Just Stop Oil: The Debate, The Detective, and The Banana

It’s not every day you get to say what you really think to lunatics on the news. And it’s not every day you get to do this alongside a renowned former Scotland Yard detective and presenter. Even more shockingly, it is certainly a one in a million occasion that you buy a singular banana to replenish the energy expended on exasperatedly ranting at said lunatics.

On Tuesday, I did all three of these things in the space of just two hours.

When I was asked to debate against Just Stop Oil at the University of York’s Dialectic Union, I had replied ‘yes, obviously’ before I had even finished reading the invitation.

Eco-protesters make my blood boil. I care deeply about climate change – I even wrote a handwritten letter to Sir David Attenborough at university, pledging I would sort it all out when (yes, when, not if) I lead this country. But if we are to tackle this monumental problem, we need unity. Unfortunately, Just Stop Oil only entrench division by hacking people off. After they pitch-invaded Wimbledon, defaced Stonehenge and held up Dartford Crossing traffic for over 36 hours on the M25, I felt like retaliating by bathing in crude oil and donating to BP.

This debate was the perfect chance to represent all you drivers, sports fans, emergency services, and every other human being in Britain to air our collective frustration at the eco-zealots ruining our daily lives.

So, once I had established there was no tomato soup within a 10-mile radius to be chucked over me, this is exactly what I did.

Let me be very clear, I levelled with them. Nobody disagrees with you that protest is an essential right, and that climate change is a colossal issue. But that vital message, I countered, is lost in the madness of your methods – alienating the public who should be your target for support.

Hardly past comparing their arrogant singing on the M25 to ordering Lin-Manuel Miranda on Wish, I ran into an obnoxious brick wall in the shape of Just Stop Oil mouthpiece Alex De Koning’s endless ‘points of information’ attempting to derail my tirade. The sheer arrogance and deafness of these unwashed eco-hooligans wasn’t just a media façade. They genuinely cannot understand why people get angry when they are late for work or stuck on the school run because Just Stop Oil’s banner-bearing idiots glued themselves to the road. This is the level of utter cluelessness we are dealing with.

Translating ordinary common sense into the foreign language of the sanctimonious eco-obsessed didn’t even seem to cut through. For the £20 million Just Stop Oil cost the Metropolitan Police in 2022/23, I said, you could carpet bomb over half of Oxford with 30,000 solar panel systems. But all I got was maniacal laughter that made me wonder if Just Stop Oil care about the environment at all. Playing in the motorway and hitting the headlines is more likely just their deranged definition of an elongated gap year.

It was very clear that some students in the audience had attended one too many of Dr Peter Gardner’s lectures, a York sociologist who debated in support of Just Stop Oil. When one of them asked if I remembered what happened at the 1913 Epsom Derby, I made a mental note to write to Nivea and ask why their moisturiser had apparently made me look at least five times my age.

To combat this drivelling nonsense from the protesters, I was very grateful to be debating alongside Peter Bleksley, a former Scotland Yard police detective and presenter. Aside from being respectful, straight-talking, and effortlessly witty, I cannot think of anyone better to debate criminals with than a policing expert. It only dawned on me whilst travelling home that a friend of mine (you know who you are) always wanted to go on Channel 4’s Hunted together – and I had spent an evening arguing alongside Hunted’s former Chief. I hope to see Peter again, just not in handcuffs at Hunted HQ.

Perhaps you’ve noticed it. Perhaps you haven’t. Either way, I’ll come clean.

This is not my usual all-guns-blazing boxing match with my keyboard. I’ve already done that with my speech – and I genuinely broke a key on my laptop writing it. Peter and I might have lost the debate on votes, but I know the silent majority are with us. This was even true in the Soviet-come-Corbynista audience at York, when plenty of brilliant students made a beeline for me at the end to whisper their agreement with my views.

And this serves as a comforting, grounding reminder. Maybe you’re sat now trying to work out where you stand on Just Stop Oil. Sometimes, it feels lonely acting with common sense because all the rowdy noise comes from the loony left, who go around shouting and throwing soup over priceless artwork. But that achieves nothing except landing them in prison.

The gobby minority will trip over their own mistakes eventually. All the silent majority have to do is sit back and watch as what we know to be true unfolds before our eyes. We’ve seen it with Keir Starmer, who we knew would fail. And we’ve seen it with Just Stop Oil, who we know to be criminals deserving of a good rinsing. And, gladly, on a cold, windy Tuesday night in York, they got just that.

Don’t be mistaken, however. It is a tiresome and exasperating experience listening to twenty whole minutes of unscientific balderdash before you can respond as the voice of reason and wisdom. It comes at the unwieldy price of thirty pence – just enough to buy you a well-earned banana, price-adjusted for train station inflation.

Image: Flickr/Alisdare Hickson

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