Here’s how to stop Just Stop Oil – his name is Sir Jonny Bairstow

The party-pooping pursuits of Just Stop Oil have irked everybody – especially fans of test cricket – but a streaker with a conscience is not to be sniffed at

When they turned up at the snooker I didn’t bat an eyelid, because snooker is dull as drywall, and watching The Crucible being sprayed orange demonstrably improved things.

Then they came for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and I still didn’t have a problem, because I have hayfever, and am becoming radically anti-flower.

Then they came for the first day of the second Ashes test, where Jonny Bairstow, England’s big-hitting wicket keeper, heaved a Just Stop Oil protester from the Lord’s outfield like a stoic carrying a stepladder back to the potting shed, a cloud of orange paint wafting around them as if they were attending the gender reveal party of a satsuma.

The high-order resistance of Jonny Bairstow – a top professional who presumably doesn’t have any special hatred for climate protesters and surely would have given the old shoulder to anyone streaking onto his pitch, whatever their political persuasion – has been met with widespread praise, even adulation, if only because Bairstow had finally caught something. Fans demanded he receive a knighthood. Even Rishi Sunak praised his “swift hands”.

But it’s also because stopping Just Stop Oil has quickly become a national pastime. At the Chelsea Flower Show, a miffed gardener sprinkled three protesters with a garden hose while another bystander called them “prats”. Middle England is not buying the message the Farrow & Ball anarchists are so keen to get across that they hung it in big letters from the Dartford Crossing.

That’s a problem, because this isn’t some fringe cause that the British public is in opposition to. The Greens made a record 200 gains at the council elections in May – the highest ever growth in the party’s 50 year history – and there is a real and convincing political argument to be made that green policies can give the taxpayer a boost at a time of runaway gas bills and crippling energy insecurity caused by the war in Ukraine.

The most irritating thing about Just Stop Oil is unquestionably then their habit of taking a position widely accepted by most of the public – that massive fossil fuel consumption is making vast swathes of the planet unlivable – and making out as if it’s an unorthadox and radical pursuit. For a protest movement that wants to ban petroleum, that is fuel for the rightwing outrage furnace.

Roger Hallam, the Extinction Rebellion founder who broke away to focus on Just Stop Oil’s more aggressive agenda, has form for misreading the room – just days before XR’s successful Autumn Rebellion drew huge crowds into central London to demonstrate public support for do-it-together climate action, he was arrested for trying to fly drones around Heathrow Airport as part of a tiny environmental protest that infuriated the rest of the movement. A month later fringe wingnuts glued themselves to the roof of a Tube train at Canning Town, infuriating bleary-eyed passengers shivering on the cold and dark early morning commute. Less century-defining suffragettism, more charge of the prawn sandwich brigade.

Still, what’s the harm? The world’s on fire. How about yours? The eerie orange glow of the New York skyline this month as Canadian forest fires blew down the East coast of an entire continent has its unhappy echo in the orange powder Just Stop Oil sprayed across the World Snooker Championship — and, like the world championship, is now an annual event. Just as dragging Insulate Britain protestors off motorways attracts an audience more loyal than Big Jet TV’s, Just Stop Oil keeps pumping oxygen into a conversation that fewer and fewer want to have aloud.

The charge that Just Stop Oil is not helping its cause hardly sticks when people who otherwise would not be talking about climate change – who would have been frothing into their Pimms as Bairstow put down another catch – will have fossil fuel on their mind for at least the best part of a half hour or two. They might even cycle home.

At last, a streaker with a conscience. It’s just not cricket. It’s bigger than that.