On 8 October 2007 a group of Greenpeace protesters broke into the Kingsnorth power station in Kent. Six of the protesters would climb the station’s 220-meter-high main chimney to paint the name of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, at its summit (they got as far as “Gordon”). When they returned to the ground, they were arrested for criminal damage. It looked as if they would have to plead guilty, but there was one way out. Years earlier, Greenpeace members had been sued for libel by the multinational burger chain McDonald’s, and had been supported with pro-bono legal work by a well-known barrister, Keir Starmer. For the Kingsnorth Six, Starmer prepared a groundbreaking defence that argued that it was necessary for the protesters to disrupt the coal-powered plant’s operations to reduce the greater damage it was doing to the environment.
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Starmer left the case before it concluded, having been appointed director of public prosecutions, but his defence eventually allowed the Greenpeace protesters to go free. “He was famously great if you were an activist,” remembers Ben Stewart, who was one of the Kingsnorth Six, “and to have him was just thrilling.”
But this week Led By Donkeys – a campaign group founded by Stewart and his fellow Kingsnorth defendant, Will Rose, along with their friends James Sadri and Ollie Knowles – projected Starmer’s face on to the front wall of Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. In a six-minute video they explained that Starmer’s government was continuing to uphold the laws, introduced under the last government, that had led to dozens of peaceful protesters being imprisoned for crimes such as throwing soup at a painting without causing any damage (two years) or joining a Zoom call to discuss causing a traffic jam (five years).
Since December 2018, Led By Donkeys has engaged in acts of protest – billboards showcasing Brexiteer hypocrisy, films projected onto public buildings, journalistic investigations and works of public art – many of which would easily fit the definition of “noisy” public protest criminalised by the last government in the Public Order Act. Stewart, who now has two young children, told me he must now “think very carefully” before he takes such risks. “The calculation is definitely affected.”
I met Knowles and Stewart in the studio in Hackney that acts as Led By Donkeys’ head office. The group gathered there on the evening of 4 July with friends and collaborators to watch the exit poll from that day’s general election. It should have been a moment of celebration: for five years the team had worked to hold the Conservative government to account, creating videos and interventions highlighting the incompetence and mendacity of the Brexiteers and the Tories under Johnson, Truss and Sunak that had been viewed hundreds of millions of times on social media. And yet the reaction to exit poll was muted. “People were clearly very pleased to see the back of the Tories,” they told me, but what really concerned them was the vote for Reform. The fight was far from over.
They work surrounded by evidence of their actions. On one wall is the blue plaque they hung on the wall of 55 Tufton Street, the office of the Institute for Economic Affairs (the think tank that advised Liz Truss), which reads: “The UK economy was crashed here”. On the door to the loo are the newspaper front pages that followed the undercover operation in which they offered MPs second jobs: Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng were among the former ministers who said they could be employed for £10,000 a day. Against another wall lean the buckets and wheelbarrows they used to paint the road outside the Russian embassy in the colours of the Ukrainian flag in February 2023.
The four met through Greenpeace, where what Stewart calls the “mind bomb theory” was central to campaigning: “If you can capture something in a single intervention, capture the essence of an argument, there really is utility in that.” The images Led By Donkeys has created vary from overtly political messages – they projected a huge image of Boris Johson over which he was branded “a liar”, on to Buckingham Palace – to works of public mourning such as the Covid Memorial Wall in London, and the five-kilometre line of children’s clothes they laid out on Bournemouth beach to memorialise the more than 11,500 children that the Palestinian health authorities have recorded as having been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces.
Some interventions take the form of jokes, such as their recent interruption of an event in which Liz Truss was being interviewed: as Truss spoke, Stewart pressed a button that caused a banner to descend from the ceiling, revealing an image of a googly-eyed lettuce (to which Truss was famously compared) over the words “I crashed the economy”. Was this necessary? Truss has herself become a joke; she is no longer prime minister, nor even a back-bench MP. She is an embarrassment to many of her former colleagues, who no longer form the government. Was this holding power to account, or mocking a defeated woman?
“With every intervention project, we always interrogate who the focus is, and whether it’s a fair target,” Knowles said. “Are we punching up or down?” Truss, they concluded, “was using her very, very short tenure as prime minister to travel the world… and articulate the cause of the far right in America and here.” Their resolve was strengthened when Truss appeared on a show in which Steve Bannon praised the far-right thug Tommy Robinson, and remained silent. In other appearances, they said, “she was trying to rewrite history around the mini-Budget, she was saying that it was the Bank of England’s fault… You can’t run away from that. You have to own it. She’s a national figure using her platform” – a platform, they noted, that costs the taxpayer more than £100,000 a year – “to articulate a worldview that we fundamentally disagree with.”
In the Truss video – watched 7.8 million times at times of writing – the former PM, who helpfully chose to wear a green dress, declares the intervention is “not funny” and walks offstage. She would later claim that “far-left activists” had intervened in her freedom of speech. But in fact the banner was unfurled at the very end of the event; Truss had already had well over an hour to espouse her views to a sympathetic audience, and was not forced from the stage. After the event, Stewart politely handed the remote control to a man he thought was a member of staff; he turned out to be Truss’s close protection officer, and Stewart was promptly arrested.
A person’s reaction to an intervention can be revealing. In June, Led By Donkeys lowered a banner referring to Nigel Farage’s admiration for Vladimir Putin while the Reform leader was speaking in Clacton. Farage’s anger was poorly concealed; he bellowed from the stage that someone at the venue “needs to get the sack” before leading a chant to “rip it down”. Did they change anyone’s mind in that room?
“I think the mask slipped,” said Stewart. “He revealed a bit of the tetchy, thin-skinned guy that he is.” Farage is “Donkey number one” as far as the team are concerned, not just because of his support for Brexit, which they oppose, but because of the considerable political power he holds, and his political aptitude. “Farage has said that Putin is the world leader that he admires the most,” Stewart said, “and he’s really good at styling that out in interviews. We wanted to do something that would embarrass him around that, and make the point that the chief beneficiary of the position that he takes there is Vladimir Putin.”
After the election the group bought the rights to use a billboard in Clacton, on which they posted the amount Farage has made from second jobs since becoming the local MP. The reaction from Reform and its supporters was one of “visceral hatred”, said Stewart. He found it revealing: “That one really got under their skin.” The poster has been torn down, but the group has the right to keep using the billboard for at least another six months.
Is Farage’s populism so different from the messaging used by Led By Donkeys? Both boil down the complexities of ideology and policy into effective, captivating statements. Do they worry they’re contributing to a political environment in which populism can flourish?
“It’s something we think about a lot,” Stewart said. “To what extent are we complicit in that way of communicating… It’s the world we live in. It’s almost impossible to progress ideas without having, to a certain extent, some ability to distil ideas and make them viral.” They take seriously the responsibility that comes with their platform, but they feel it is justified: “We feel that we’re rooted in a certain truth, in progressive values.”
A lot of background work goes into the research and discussion behind an intervention. If an idea does not seem genuinely truthful, they told me, they step away. Despite their opposition to Brexit, they intervened to defend the demonstrators of the 2019 March to Leave: “They were marching for something they believed in. Brexit is not some crazy, unreasonable position. We disagree with it, but they were activists, we’re activists. We had something in common.”
Activists for what? Thousands of people pay up to £120 per year (they do not accept larger donations) to support Led By Donkeys, but the group has no manifesto, has never publicly espoused its politics. What do they believe in? They uphold the benefits of immigration, although they recognise why it becomes contested in an unequal society. They opposed Brexit and they think the UK should re-join the EU, but they don’t see it happening any time soon.
They have worked until now under Conservative governments, but they have no intention of giving Labour a free pass. “During the course of the last Labour government, I can’t remember how many times we were arrested [as Greenpeace members] protesting their policies,” said Stewart. “We are very comfortable getting arrested for protesting Labour governments.” They oppose the two-child benefit cap and are concerned about the impact of means-testing winter fuel payments on pensioners in poverty. They believe in electoral reform, even if it would give more seats to the parties, such as Reform, that they oppose. Like most people, they do not fit into a single box. “I read the Telegraph every morning – I read all the papers”, Stewart said.
Despite existing mainly as a social media operation, Led By Donkeys have none of the populist’s disdain for the traditional press. Sourcing the facts for their interventions involves “leaning on” the reporting of the wider media and they are positive about its role in democracy. When they appear at live events, Knowles tells the audience: “Subscribe to print media, get a newspaper, get a political magazine. Inform yourself. Having that information is an integral and important part of being an active citizen, and we cannot be passive citizens any more.”
Led by Donkeys will appear at Cambridge Literary Festival on 24 November. The event is available to watch in person and via livestream
“Adventures in Art, Activism and Accountability” by Led by Donkeys is published by Thames & Hudson.
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[See also: Wes Streeting: “I don’t want to be the fun police”]
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