Has there ever been a lamer protest group than Led By Donkeys? I’m old enough to remember when protest was raucous, occasionally even sexy. The young and the angry rising up in fury against their irritant rulers. Now it’s four craft-beer bros from Stoke Newington whose idea of ‘rebellion’ is to titillate the middle classes with a naff projection about how awful Brexit is.
Led By Donkeys have never exactly been daring
The chattering class’s favourite faux troublemakers are back with another cunning stunt. This time they’re giving Brexit, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss a break and are aiming their macchiato-fuelled spleen at Donald Trump. I bet you’re shocked that this agitprop group that is basically a Guardian leader made flesh also suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
On Tuesday, as the president landed for his second state visit, they hauled their projectors down to Windsor and shone onto the castle old photos of Trump cosying up to his late pal Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the political equivalent of saying ‘ner ner’. It’s the square kids shouting ‘You’re a meanie’. It heaps shame on Britain’s fine and long tradition of protest that such a juvenile display of turbo-smug Trump-phobia now counts as ‘edgy’.
But then, Led By Donkeys have never exactly been daring. Their stunts are best understood as a yelp of bourgeois rage. They’re the militant wing of the leafy suburbs’ loathing for Brexit, Trump, populism and anything else that feels a tad too oik-ish. They’re not really protesters at all – they’re jesters to the court of received opinion whose chief role is the colonisation of public space with middle-class moaning.
Most protest groups are founded in response to some grave wrong by the state. Led By Donkeys was set up to rage against the wrongness of the people. The Guardian published a gushing profile of the group a few years back. It revealed that the founders are four men in sensible jumpers called Ben, James, Oliver and Will who came up with the idea for Led By Donkeys in their cosy alcove in the Birdcage pub in Stoke Newington. Right out of central casting. ‘[This] seems an unlikely birthplace for a rebellion’, fawned the Guardian journo, making me cringe so hard my sciatica almost came back.
It was their ‘collective despair’ over the ‘lies, lunacy and hypocrisy’ of Brexit that inspired them to act, they said. Isn’t that extraordinary? A protest movement founded not to expand democracy but to bitch about it. A ‘progressive’ outfit whose foundational belief is that democracy is a pain in the arse. The Chartists and Suffragettes spin in their graves when these gastro-pub agitators with their luxuriant despair over the largest vote in British history are hailed as the new rebels.
Sometimes the latent snobbery of Led By Donkeys leaks out. That Guardian profile from 2019 recounts their ‘venture’ to Dover, that ‘Farage stronghold’ and ‘frontline of Brexit’, where in the dead of night they cheekily put up some Brexit-bashing posters. We were ‘pretty nervous’, they said. Well, it is Dover – a frightful place, what? It has the feel of a civilising mission, doesn’t it? Four well-read men from gentrified London ‘venturing’ to the dark heart of Kent to try to prise open the eyes of that strange tribe of Faragists.
Led By Donkeys are a curious new beast: regime protesters. They don’t speak truth to power – they give voice to the haughty angst of the privileged. This is why they seem to have adopted a Hands Off policy with regards to the Labour government and are still wanging on about the Tories – even Liz Truss! – rather than Sir Keir and his myriad scandals and failures. Because their aim is less to improve the lot of the British people than to vent the snooty obsessions of a tiny section of it.
Protest has come to be colonised by the comfortable. Once a tool for the hard-up to put pressure on the establishment, now it’s little more than a noisy manifestation of establishment opinion. Trans women are women, Israel is bad, Trump is an oaf – not one of these opinions would be out of place at a literary soirée. That’s why it felt so refreshing to see the Unite the Kingdom march: ordinary people saying things the establishment doesn’t want to hear. Oiks on the streets? Bet Led By Donkeys were sobbing into their Camden Hells.
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