I get tired of people telling me how I should live my life. I’ve survived to the ripe old age of 64 with some reasonable success and have, I think, contributed positively to others’ lives during the course of my own. That doesn’t stop others telling me how I should live differently, in the way they think I should live. Christians do it, of course (more on that next time) and now there’s Extinction Rebellion dictating to us. It would be folly to deny, as Trump and his evangelical sycophants do, that the planet is in trouble. We do need to act now to protect it, but irresponsible pranks (and they are pranks) like mass nurse-ins, occupying and disrupting city centres and airports and spraying red paint over buildings is not how to do it. Campaigners wouldn’t be able to have nurse-ins if they weren’t producing offspring to use the resources of this already overcrowded planet; they wouldn’t be driving or using polluting public transport to get to protests; they wouldn’t be creating a mess with red paint.

The prime minster’s father, Stanley Johnson, was interviewed on the radio this morning. He’s a supporter of Extinction Rebellion and has spoken at some of their rallies. The reporter, Nick Robinson, asked him if, to help protect the environment, he would be giving up flying. Johnson responded by saying something along the lines of, ‘Of course not. Although I’m a frequent flyer, I need to fly to give speeches in different parts of the world about how to save the planet.’ How self-defeating is that? You want to save the planet? Don’t fly, don’t use fossil-fuelled transport (and it’s all largely fossil-fuelled), don’t add to the levels of pollution by wasting gallons of red paint other people have to clean up in their fossil-fuelled vehicles, don’t make more humans.

‘Change begins with me’, as we used to say, not by telling others how to live while hypocritically making an exception of yourself.