Was it the courts, was it the cops, was it the Sun? So who killed Just Stop Oil?

As the climate activists stage their farewell protest, David Taylor talks to veteran campaigners about why they did it, what they achieved - and where they are going next

- David Taylor

Get Up, Stand Up is blaring out of somebody's speakers when a few dozen people log in to the Zoom call. It's a Wednesday night in November 2022, and the usual mix of badly lit bedrooms and unflattering close-ups, except for a handful of people, with usernames like FlowerPower, keeping their cameras turned off.

For a solid month, climate activists from Just Stop Oil have been throwing soup, “locking on”, and spray-painting London landmarks. They've been hitting motorways and bridges, football matches and galleries, targeting Suella Braverman’s Home Office and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The autumn of 2022 has been an orange-hued season of civil disobedience.

Bob Marley fades out and a man with long grey hair and glasses called Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Just Stop Oil, sets the scene for an operation to shut the M25 at junctions all around London’s perimeter.

Lou Lancaster, a former special needs teacher in her 50s, talks about the time she climbed a motorway gantry and was up there for hours while police shut the road below and sent a specialist climbing team to bring her down. Hallam tells the group that if the protest goes on for three or four days it will be the biggest disruption in British history and would force the government into action.

What he doesn’t know is that FlowerPower, listening with her camera off, is a journalist from the Sun - and she’s recording everything.

Just Stop Oil's plans are about to set in motion the most severe judicial crackdown against non-violent protest that the UK has ever seen. Lancaster will get four years in prison, Hallam will be sentenced to five.

Climate protesters - “eco zealots” if you read the Daily Mail - have enraged motorists, stretched police and prompted the Conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to pass two laws with anti-protest measures to punish them.