How I avoided arrest yesterday

Living in a stifling atmosphere saturated with tawdry vulgarity, one has to come up for a gulp of fresh air now and then. That’s why the National Gallery is our usual haunt, what with its air full of cultural oxygen.

We’ve been going to the National once a month or so for 35 years and, though we know every inch of every painting there, the gallery never fails to provide the resuscitation we seek. That’s why, when Penelope suggested we go there yesterday, I nodded enthusiastically.

But then I looked out of the window, which exertion led to an inner conflict, not to say turmoil. The day was sunny, and it would be misleading to suggest that London is blessed with many such days in November. Nice weather usually spells t-e-n-n-i-s for me, hence the conflict between my spiritual and physical needs.

The latter prevailed, and I drove to my club, having come up with a lame excuse for doing so. We have tickets for two on-going exhibitions, of Rubens and Holbein, I said. Going over to the National Gallery a few days before attending those would constitute not so much a dose of aesthetic pleasure as an overdose. I’m not sure Penelope agreed, but she knows better than to get between me and tennis.

That saved me from having my collar felt.

You see, we seldom look at every painting each time we go to the National. Yet we never bypass some, especially those of the early Renaissance, along with the Dutch and Spanish art of the 17^th century. Vermeer and Rembrandt, Zurbarán and Velázquez are as essential to our spiritual diet as malt whisky is essential to mine and coffee to Penelope’s.

Hence it’s a distinct statistical probability that I would have been admiring Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus even as two Just Stop Oil thugs were vandalising it. Since I’m a firm believer in ‘just stopping’ not oil but such thugs, I would have reacted violently.

Experience has taught me that persuasion doesn’t work with crazed fanatics; only violence does. Hence I would have come out swinging, and there would have been blood on the floor – most probably mine, because at my age I’m less equipped for fisticuffs than in my younger days. But they wouldn’t have escaped punishment either and, more important, the painting would have been saved.

As it was, those two criminals only used their hammers to smash the protective glass of the painting, not the pigment crusted 400 years ago. But I would have had no way of knowing that in advance, and that canvas is of much greater value to me than the noses, indeed the lives, of some obsessed scum.

You might say that isn’t the way a civilised person must act and, if he does, it raises legitimate doubts about his being civilised. I can’t argue with that comment – you’d be right. But pray tell me what other recourse I would have had.

Call the police? Yes, that would have been civilised. It would also have been useless because it takes less time to destroy a priceless painting than for cops to arrive. And letting that scum vandalise Velázquez and then walk away unmolested would have been impossible for me.

In the end, they didn’t walk away, choosing instead to stick around and mouth the usual moronic twaddle. The cops did arrive and arrested the vandals, who are now going to have their knuckles rapped. They were charged with causing criminal damage, the penalty for which is contingent on the extent of damage inflicted.

Since they only broke some glass, my guess is they’ll get away with a warning and perhaps a small fine. Had I smashed their faces, I wouldn’t have got off quite so easily.

When the vandals face the magistrate, no doubt their lawyer will offer in extenuation their deep commitment to the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’. Since the cause is in fact ignoble, I rather think such commitment should be an aggravating circumstance instead, but that’s not how our jurisprudence works.

By contrast, striking a physical blow in defence of our civilisation would be seen as a violent crime, and never mind the cause. That’s why, when Just Stop Oil mobs wreak havoc on London traffic by blocking vital thoroughfares, not one of them has so far suffered any physical retribution.

Some drivers get out of their cars and try to drag the fanatics away to clear the carriageway, but that’s as far as it gets. The police are typically in attendance but, just as typically, they do nothing. People have a right to demonstrate for the causes they see as just, they’d say – or rather would be instructed to say.

Society, on the other hand, isn’t allowed to protect itself even in situations where authorities offer no protection. Thus the two vandals will be free to join hundreds of thousands of others to disrupt the Armistice Day commemorations. They’ll be screaming “Palestine free, from the river to the sea”, even though many of them won’t be able to identify the river involved or find it on the map.

If such recent sabbaths are anything to go by, Muslims will make up only about 20 per cent of the mob. The others will mostly be members of lumpen intelligentsia, alumni of our schools and universities where they learned to hate our civilisation and love its enemies.

Dress rehearsals for 11 November have been held throughout last week, with the Met pretending it has been doing something about it. According to its spokesman, “Around 100 arrests were made by officers along Whitehall during another day of disruption by Just Stop Oil. These arrests were made for breaching section seven of the Public Order Act at various points between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, including near to the Cenotaph. No protester glued themselves to the road. There were no offences linked to the Cenotaph”.

Quite. But I assure you there will be, and the two vandals will be out in time to join in the fun. And even those 100 already arrested will be released in good time.

Now I invite you to exercise your imagination and picture hundreds of thousands of conservatives joining Jews to flood central London. They’d be carrying placards and chanting mantras calling for killing all Gaza Muslims and for Israel to reclaim all of her ancient land, including Judaea and Samaria – perhaps even Egypt and Iraq where the Israelites were once enslaved.

Do you think just a paltry 100 people would be arrested? If that’s a difficult question, here’s an easier one: if a scared septuagenarian seriously wounded a burglar, which one would go to prison?

Both Just Stop Oil and Free Palestine fanatics come from the same classroom as most of our civil servants. The latter may or these days may not speak with better accents, but they certainly don’t espouse better ideas. Hence they sense kinship with the fanatics and won’t punish them too severely by defending the putative good causes with too much youthful impetuosity.

But who will defend the really good cause of our civilisation? Some isolated and impotent individuals not even worth talking about. They won’t make a dent in the awful juggernaut and won’t even slow it down. So all we can do is rejoice that those vandals took hammers to Velázquez, not acid. And that so far no Jews have been murdered in North London, even though hundreds have been abused.

Thank God (and our government) for small favours.