JAN MOIR: My Christmas was all of the extra cheery as a result of the Just Stop Oil protesters are nonetheless behind bars. Let’s hope the courts preserve it that manner

Don’t know about you, but my Christmas was improved immensely by the cheering thought that the Just Stop Oil protesters who blocked the M25 in 2022 are still behind bars.

Every spoonful of festive sugar made all the sweeter by imagining a grim jailscape featuring JSO ringleaders feasting on gruel and darning mailsacks in their freezing cells. 

You’d think they’d be glad of the undeniable climate crisis benefits of incarceration – living communally, consuming fewer megawatts, burning fewer fossil fuels, not driving cars and being exempt from boarding gas-guzzling public transport… but no.

The wretches want out and are appealing their sentences. Now Friends Of The Earth and Greenpeace UK have been allowed to intervene in support of the famous five when they challenge their jail terms in court next month.

But why? Surely the law must concern itself with only the effect, not the cause – no matter how righteous and justified these fanatics consider their actions to be. Few need reminding that for their roles in disrupting traffic on the orbital motorway around London, JSO leader Roger Hallam was jailed for five years while activists Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were given four years each.

You might recall Cressida’s mother poshly complaining outside the court that her daughter’s sentence ‘means she will not be present at her brother’s wedding next summer’. Well, that still makes me weep – with laughter.

It also perfectly illustrates the sanctimony and selfishness at the heart of modern-day activists and their supporters. They can disrupt your lives for the sake of their cause, but God forbid they should suffer any inconvenience themselves. 

Yet if you are willing and prepared to break the law because your belief in your chosen crusade is so passionate, then surely you must accept the consequences? You can’t barter about being a martyr. Just ask Joan of Arc.

Friends of the Earth said it would argue that the JSO sentences breach human rights legislation – but what about the human rights of the thousands of innocent citizens whose plans were wrecked and lives inconvenienced by the M25 protest?

More than 40 activists climbed onto gantries over the motorway for four successive days, at times bringing traffic to a standstill. It caused 50,000 hours of vehicle delay, an economic hit of nearly £800,000 and cost the Metropolitan Police more than £1.1million.

And of course the endless delays and frustration had a human cost; pupils missed exams, travellers missed flights, patients missed hospital appointments, the bereaved missed funerals, misery and frustration were unbounded.

That’s why I hope the law stands firm. For this is not a case for leniency, despite JSO’s claims that they are ‘not real criminals’.

I beg to differ. At the time of committing this particular crime, all five of the JSO activists were on bail for at least one other set of proceedings. Leader Hallam, a career agitator, has 13 convictions for direct action protests. The only thing that has finally stopped him being a menace to the public is a custodial sentence. 

And his masterplan, as revealed during the jury trial at Southwark Crown Court, was to do even more damage. He wanted to gridlock the whole of London and to hell with the horrendous public safety issues that would have incurred.

In court next month JSO, Friends Of The Earth and Greenpeace will argue that there should be ‘proportionate’ penalties for climate change protesters – as if somehow their motivation in itself is a cause for mitigation.

Yet one thing became clear in 2024 – the public are heartily sick of these woke, progressive disruptors inflicting the extremism of their myriad causes upon us. The trans rights lobby and the ‘river to the sea’ mob – to name but two others – all preach about tolerance and acceptance while showing very little forbearance themselves.

JSO are environmental extremists who claim that their campaign of direct action – throwing soup over paintings, trying and failing to spray orange paint on Taylor Swift’s jet, obstructing public transport systems, using fire extinguishers filled with powder paint in an attempt to ruin the Duke of Westminster’s wedding – has to be disruptive to draw attention to the urgency of the ’emergency’.

However, all they have achieved is alienating their fellow citizens who don’t take kindly to having their lives thrown into disarray by such grandstanding idiocy. They think they are on the moral high ground but they are not above the law. Neither are they entitled to appoint themselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.

And I dearly hope this is reflected in the appeal decision.

Pat on the back for little royals

Having been a frontline observer in royal crowds myself, I can faithfully report that not everyone who queues for hours for the opportunity to meet the Windsors is – how can I put this? – entirely free of mental health issues.

Some are just royalists, pure and simple. A few are lonely or needy – and God bless them. Yet there is also a scattering of the slightly deranged, as there is at any event involving public figures.

And it always seemed clear to me that there were those who had projected the personal need for a close family relationship of their own on to Charles and Camilla or William and Kate – and also on to their children.

That’s why I was so impressed with the younger royals negotiating the crowds outside the church following the Christmas Day service at Sandringham. The shouts for attention, the gifting of chocolate bars or garage forecourt flowers, the mad exhortations of affection and rambling good wishes.

It cannot be easy, yet all of them – little George, Charlotte, Louis, the Tindall tinies – handled it with aplomb. They were turned out so perfectly and were so charming, that they deserve a little festive pat on the back.

Can it really be 20 years this week since the Boxing Day tsunami? The horror seems too freshly minted, the unimaginable terror of all those caught up in one of the deadliest natural disasters of recent times.

There is something so raw about tragedy over the festive season.

It makes everything so much worse, although it should not. The plane crash in Kazakhstan, the carnage at the Christmas market in Germany, the eternal horror of Lockerbie.

Perhaps it is the thought of people planning to be with their families and loved ones at Christmas – but who never make it home – that makes it all so piercingly sad.

Can we trust mental health gurus?

This might come as a terrible shock to absolutely no one, but staff at mental health firm BetterUp have apparently implied that the US-based business is a ‘toxic train wreck’ where ‘everyone is uncomfortable’.

Can this be true? These were comments left on a website and have yet to be verified – but it does suggest a degree of trouble at the firm which pays Prince Harry a reported £1million a year to be their Chief Impact Officer.

And what chief impact has he made, pray tell? Harry credits BetterUp with improving his mental health post Megxit and surely there are others who have benefited from its services?

Yet in California in particular, the mental health racket is big business; the new wild frontier of enterprise and profit. Some BetterUp clients are allegedly unhappy, complaining about a lack of confidentiality when discussing their innermost problems – a grim prospect when you are baring your soul to strangers in the hope of feeling better.

However, this lack of privacy about personal issues is not something that worries Harry. For years he has been telling anyone who will listen about every slight tick inside his tock; every tiny mal-thought on every tiny matter inside his feverish brain.

Harry has always been external about his internals and what BetterUp has done to improve them, including the EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) techniques he uses to treat anxiety. 

So it helps him, but one wonders how much can we trust the mental health industry and those who claim to be inspirational gurus. These include actor and director Justin Baldoni, who has been accused of sexual harassment by Blake Lively on the set of their recent film, It Ends With Us.

Baldoni set himself up as a mental health deep thinker. His book – Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity – purported to tell men how to respect women and be a better man, just like him. Now this supposed he-feminist has been fired by his agent and castigated by Lively for disgusting behaviour towards women and ungallant conduct.

Baldoni denies all accusations, but it would be awful to think that there are those who set out merely to profit from the misery of others – even if sometimes that is exactly what it looks like.

Not going to lie, I loved this wonderful finale

Oh, my Christ, as Pam would say. I’m not gonna lie to you, as Nessa would say. The Gavin & Stacey The Finale (BBC1) was absolutely wonderful. Simple as.

From the moment Pam (Alison Steadman) appeared with her party platters, ‘checking the flow’ of her buffet and planning to put the charcuterie next to the fromagerie, this 90-minute farewell show was a winner all the way. 

There were so many magical moments, from Smithy saying that ‘tomorrow is my stag, the most important night of my life’ to Neil the Baby singing at the wedding to Pam (yet again) ‘eating granola in preparation for my second life’, it was all magical.

Written by James Corden and Ruth Jones –who also star as Smithy and Nessa, left – this show has always been a cockle-warming celebration of family, friendship and love.

More importantly, it is also a drama that – for once – celebrates working-class people instead of mocking them or fetishising them or diminishing them in some way. Neither does it show them as life’s perpetual victims, the lumpish downtrodden, send in the clowns. Got to love it for that alone.

Mick (so perfectly acted by Larry Lamb) was always my favourite character – and he certainly got his due and his big moments in what is supposed to be the last ever show.

His speech in the pub about welcoming Smithy into the family and the moment at the wedding when Smithy looked at him for support and validation – well. I’m not ashamed to say I shed a tear. Oh Mick, as Pam would say. All the drama, I just love it.