THE HARDCORE MOB BENT ON CAUSING MAYHEM

MIRANDA WHELEHAN

HAD a bruising encounter with Richard Madeley on ITV’s

Good Morning Britain in April. Madeley accused the 21-yearold, above, who grew up in a £1million, five-bedroom house in Weybridge, Surrey, of being a hypocrite and branded Just Stop Oil as a ‘childish’ and ‘playground-ish’ response to a complex problem. She replied: ‘I would say that the answers are actually very simple. We need to stop new oil licensing and that’s what we’re asking.’ The exchange was likened to a scene in the Netflix satire Don’t Look Up, when a scientist, played by Jennifer Lawrence, fails to get two TV news anchors to take warnings about the end of the world seriously.

LOUIS McKECHNIE

HAS been arrested about 20 times, including when he tied himself to a goalpost during an Everton vs Newcastle Premier League match. McKechnie, 21, from Dorset, has complained it is ‘really stressful’ being arrested and dealing with an angry public. The student has been jailed for blocking the M25 as part of an Insulate Britain protest, but said his experience of prison had not deterred him and that he would be willing to spend the rest of his life behind bars for the cause. He is awaiting trial for allegedly damaging a Vincent Van Gogh painting in London, having pleaded not guilty.

DR LARCH MAXEY

REAL name Ian and pictured in the circle above, he spent four weeks underground last year with veteran eco-warrior Swampy after protesters tunnelled under the HS2 rail site near Euston in London. He is currently in another tunnel near a fuel depot in Essex.

He told an Insulate Britain meeting last year attended by an undercover Mail on Sunday reporter that the group was recruiting working-class spokespeople in a bid to shake off its middle-class image.

In one interview, he said he had no income and described himself as a ‘relaxed freegan’ – scavaging leftover food that

would otherwise go to waste.

ROGER HALLAM

AS A co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, the 56-year-old has masterminded a wave of hugely disruptive protests.

He claimed that the Met police would be ‘too scared’ to arrest activists initially, but that officers would be forced to do so as protests escalate, tying up their resources.

Describing himself as a ‘farmer mobiliser revolutionary’, Hallam grandly says he is following ‘in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi’. He was an organic farmer in Carmarthen for 20 years but blamed the collapse of his business on a series of extreme weather events.

Later he researched the history of civil disobedience for a PhD at King’s College London while ‘sleeping in his car’.

He was ‘unreservedly denounced’ by Extinction Rebellion in 2019 for describing the Holocaust as ‘just another f***ery in human history’.