Meet mischief-makers Josh Pieters and Archie Manners, who recently pulled off a brilliantly executed prank at a Just Stop Oil banquet. With orange helium balloons and panic alarms, they mockingly disrupted the event, sparking widespread attention and ridicule for the controversial protest movement. They were also responsible for the ‘Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off’ protest last week, which successfully stopped the eco-militants disrupting traffic. Is this the way to stop Just Stop Oil? The Telegraphhas more.
All it took was a fleet of orange helium balloons and a few panic alarms tactically placed at a Just Stop Oil banquet to disrupt it. In a matter of minutes, the group that has blighted our summer had been given a taste of its own medicine. Or as one commenter underneath the video of the stunt online put it: “Great idea, I did this at Eton in 1997.”
In many ways, it was a textbook muck-up day prank, just the kind of childish scene that plays out on the last day before the summer holidays in schools up and down the country. But with the simplest of moves, Josh Pieters, 29, and Archie Manners, 30, had done what no one else had successfully managed to – they’d made a mockery of Just Stop Oil.
On Tuesday, in an artfully dilapidated church decorated with swathes of orange fabric and trailing plants (making the whole affair look like something between a summer soirée hosted by Fanta and a Christian influencer’s wedding), guests sat down to a (vegan) banquet. A harpist played as people sat at long tables. Then four paid actors burst in, setting off panic alarms attached to helium balloons which promptly floated up to the eaves.
“I’m slightly nervous we’ve given them an idea,” says Manners of his prank, which has been viewed nearly 450,000 times in two days, and was designed to mimic the sorts of antics that JSO has made their bread and butter.
In recent months, JSO has been an irritation at every public event, from the snooker to the Proms. Now, if you turn on any sort of sports match or concert (or, indeed, find yourself attending the wedding of a former member of the Cabinet), you find you are in a constant state of alert for that spray of orange. Their determination to continue blocking roads and disrupting perfectly inoffensive games of cricket has already turned many off their cause, but the public’s growing impatience hasn’t yet been enough to see them off. Perhaps it’s because until now the feeling towards Just Stop Oil had been, broadly, one of anger. And what is a more powerful tool than rancour? Ridicule.
“[The event] was a party, there are no two ways of putting it,” says Manners, who with Pieters is a YouTube comedian and professional prankster. And it was the snooker stunt that was the final straw in his eyes. “It was hardly attended by big oil execs.” That and reports like this week’s, that the group’s protests have cost the Metropolitan Police £7.7 million since April.
Thanks to Manners and Pieters, a counter-movement has been building in recent weeks. For £13.99 you can order a T-shirt in signature JSO orange with the words: “Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off” emblazoned across it. “I want to donate to this cause,” says one commenter, “keep it going, guys.”
“The people that they’re targeting are not responsible for their cause,” says Manners. “A single mother trying to get to work to feed her kids during a cost of living crisis, who might be on a zero hours contract, who might be late for work and therefore earn less money. That achieves precisely nothing when it comes to solving the climate crisis.”
Stop Press: Camilla Tominey, writing in the Telegraph, points out that the Just Stop Oil protestors are all middle- or upper-middle class and the targets of their ire are working class. Is this just rampant snobbery?
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