Maybe you’ve heard the story of how Ben Stewart, James Sadri, Oliver Knowles and Will Rose became Led By Donkeys. They’d met through working at Greenpeace and become friends, and were having a drink in a north London pub at the end of 2018. For two years, Brexit had dominated every news cycle. “We were just completely flummoxed by the chaos the country had been pitched into,” Ben remembers, talking from the Donkeys HQ in Hackney. The four were laughing at David Cameron’s 2015 election tweet: “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband”. It would be a shame if he deleted it, they agreed. “We said, ‘Let’s put it up on a billboard,’” Stewart continues. “We just found somebody to print it, did it with wallpaper paste – David Cameron wrapped round Ollie’s head, that kind of thing.” It was papered over almost immediately, as were their next four guerrilla billboards, but they survived on social media.
What they sometimes call an “accountability project”, and this newspaper once called a “satirical artists’ collective” (“That’s nice, isn’t it? We’ll take that,” Knowles says), was born. It would go on to create actions, spectacles and happenings around Covid, Boris Johnson’s mendacity, the scandal of PPE procurement, government corruption, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, sewage in the waterways, the number of children killed in Gaza. They started a crowdfunder in the middle of 2019, and by November that year, having raised half a million pounds, they were the biggest crowdfunded political movement in the nation’s history. They’re extremely proud of small donations, but have capped larger ones at £1,250, not wanting to be beholden to anyone. It’s hard to say how this finishes, since it will be over when hypocrisy’s over, but that’s how it all started. The origin story goes back further, though. Stewart and Knowles met in the late 90s, when Knowles was a hunt saboteur and Stewart was the press officer for the League Against Cruel Sports. Stewart was also running undercover agents in the Countryside Alliance, “and we got some amazing stories from that, if you want to know how comms can make change”. Ten years later, they broke into Didcot power station and climbed the tower, protesting about coal burning, which is where they met Rose, who was a Greenpeace photographer. Stewart remembers thinking two thoughts: “One, what an amazing sunset. And two, why have the police brought horses? How are they going to get horses up a tower?” That action saw them in court, and when they were found not guilty in 2009, the case sparked the end of coal burning. The law can bring change, but sometimes needs people who are prepared to break it.
Sadri met Rose on a ship, just after the horrific Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010. “We were trying to stop reckless drilling in the North Sea,” Sadri says. He ran into Stewart in the actual sea: “It’s a tactic called ‘swimmers in the water’. It’s the least skilled intervention you could possibly do.” Stewart says, “It was a bit battle of the Somme: ‘Just go!’” – a first world war motif that would maybe, a decade later, inform their name (“lions led by donkeys” referring to the indifferent, incompetent and hypocritical leaders who ushered so many millions to their deaths). “They take you out on a speedboat and drop you in the sea, this huge drill ship steaming towards you. The idea is that they look at these people in the water and then decide to stop,” Sadri says. The first three times, they didn’t. “And then Ben got pinged down one side, I got pinged down the other side, as this massive thing went past – it was like the Empire State Building.” It finally did stop, but they had to stay in the sea, in four-hour shifts, to make sure it didn’t start moving again. “We talked about activism, about Palestine,” Stewart says. He’d spent time in Israel and Palestine in the 90s, while Sadri was born in Iran (his mother is Iranian) and came to the UK when he was eight. “We were just treading water,” Stewart continues, “and we ended up having a good chat.” Sadri says: “I don’t remember it like that. I remember mainly talking about your messy love life.”
So Greenpeace is their institutional hinterland; they all worked there at times, though the charity knew nothing about Led By Donkeys when it started. “The founders of Greenpeace had this idea of the mind bomb,” says Stewart, “an intervention that, when people saw it, their minds would immediately shift. The idea was the person putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale.” (Knowles literally has done direct action in the Indian Ocean, protecting tuna from overfishing). “We were all schooled in that kind of political intervention,” Sadri says. But when Rose talks about “the loyalty I have to the other three” it’s not a professional bond; it’s a solidarity, zeal and trust that comes from freezing in the same sea. Not to overromanticise it, but there’s a reason that they climbed a ladder to put up a billboard and you (and I) didn’t. The funny thing is, none of them was an especially ardent Remainer. Stewart and Knowles both grew up near Ashford in Kent, but didn’t know each other when they were kids. “You could see France from my school playground,” Stewart says. “I grieved so heavily, knowing that borders were coming. It meant so much for me to think that my kids could easily go and live and work and love abroad.” But as a political project, Knowles says, “I definitely saw the EU as a distant power, very remote. It didn’t sit comfortably with my politics. Only after the referendum did it become clear that Brexit was a deregulation project; a threat to environmental regulations that we had fought for, a threat to workers’ rights and protections.” Sadri was in Beirut when the result came in, “working on a campaign”, he describes modestly, “to get aid to frontline humanitarian workers in Syria” (The Syria Campaign is actually a huge deal in INGO circles, but I only learn that later from someone else). Post-2016, the picture started to cohere. “Brexit,” Sadri says, “the fact that migrants are dying, namelessly; pregnant women and children drowning in the Channel, in the Mediterranean, plus we’re having these racist riots on the streets, it doesn’t feel disconnected. It’s all a continuation of this nativist surge, and the impact it has on how we see ourselves and how we see each other. Our entire project has been about basically confronting that at every turn.”
While Sadri was following the xenophobic through-line, Stewart, having worked on climate for a long time, was really aware of “who the TaxPayers’ Alliance are, the Institute of Economic Affairs. The minute I saw their involvement in the Leave campaign, I thought, I get what’s going on here. They have a plan to completely gut climate regulation.” But first came Covid. Stewart says the original Brexit-related billboards were partly a response to “this short-term political memory where nothing lasts: all those promises that were made in 2016, that weren’t realised, whoopsie daisy.” The pandemic put that short-termism on stilts: “The frustration was seeing how quickly the news cycle went,” Rose says. “Things happened. There would be no consequences. No accountability. You’d read the news, and then there would be more news.” “It became clear very quickly,” Knowles says, “that Johnson was making an absolute hash of it. It wasn’t long before we started working on 10-minute timeline films that locked in his performance from one week to the next. Those were great for the next chapter of Led By Donkeys, because they really took off.” The workload was incredible: Rose was working 9am to 4pm, hanging out with his kids after school, then working 9pm to 4am, for weeks.
“Those Covid films,” Knowles says, “led to a collaboration with Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, Matt [Fowler] and Jo [Goodman].” This is key to how the group see their role: amplifying people who are directly affected, whether by Brexit or Covid. Sadri says, “It’s about identifying and elevating the people who need to be heard. It’s morally unassailable when you hear somebody who’s been through it.” At this point, 140,000 people had died, and there had been profound failures by government. Boris Johnson was talking about a government-led memorial, and “everybody felt,” Sadri says, “we have to stop this guy. We have to decide how we collectively remember this.” This impulse became the memorial wall along the banks of the Thames, comprising 150,000 hearts drawn by the people who’d lost someone. It was unauthorised, remarkable and poignant. It shot the government’s fox, made it impossible for the party animals to take ownership of that grief. That was March 2021. In August, Led By Donkeys collaborated with the Good Law Project on government procurement during the pandemic, which led to, among other things, a renaming of Michelle Mone’s yacht, in early 2023, to the Pandemic Profiteer. By now, they were working on everything. “We were on our way to Spain to do Michelle Mone’s yacht,” Stewart remembers, “and on our way, we were emailing Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng, trying to induce them to work for our fake South Korean company [both men agreed], and as soon as we got back from Spain, we were in a warehouse working on the Russian embassy Ukraine action. It’s one hat on, one hat off. Corruption in Westminster, Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the PPE scandal – they’re all different and all the tactics were different, but if you’d said ‘I’m an anti-corruption activist’ or ‘I’m a Ukraine activist’ that would have precluded you from doing those other things.”
The Public Order Act 2023 would make even that Russian embassy action, for which they had to stop traffic to paint a Ukrainian flag on the tarmac, risky: “You block a road, you can go to jail for two years,” Stewart says. “I’ve got young kids, we all have. That’s not even a conversation now.” He actually did get arrested during their action last month, where they unfurled a banner of a lettuce, captioned “I crashed the economy” while Liz Truss was speaking. The way they organised that was so ingenious that I want to tell you, but then I’d have to kill you, etc. However, Stewart blew it at the very end by asking a security guy to hold the banner’s remote control, only to find that the man was part of Truss’s security detail. Knowles is resolute, though: “I don’t feel fearful. That’s how they want you to be. We will continue to explore a full suite of direct-action tactics. Yes, we’re aware of the change, but we wouldn’t feel dissuaded.” Sadri is careful to point out that theirs isn’t the only game in town. “There are plenty of people, without our constraints, still doing direct action, despite these insane laws.”
In February of this year, they laid 11,000 children’s outfits along three miles of Bournemouth beach, to represent the children killed in Gaza. “We wanted people to be able to feel what that many kids is like,” Sadri says. “1,000 kids, 10,000 kids, there’s absolutely no difference when you’re watching Channel 4 News. How do you turn that into something experiential?” What’s happening in Palestine is affecting how he sees everything, he says, and making him much less positive. Stewart has been galvanised by the right’s attacks on net zero: “We lost on Brexit, and now there are borders, and we grieve that. But that is as nothing compared to losing on climate.” Knowles is “not mindlessly optimistic. But if you look at climate change, we’ve got huge fights ahead of us, but we do have all the solutions we need to address climate change. It’s just a battle of political will.” They don’t all share one brain, in other words, but they do all share Rose’s sense of commitment: “I’ve never ever been so driven, at any other point in my life, wanting to do this work, feeling that it’s important, feeling that it achieves something.” • Led by Donkeys: Adventures in Art, Activism and Accountability is published by Thames & Hudson (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com