Just Stop Oil are REALLY annoyed Pro-Palestine lot have bumped them off news agenda

It’s not often you get to see three arses at once in the National Gallery but the idiot children from Just Stop Oil afforded us that delight today when they attacked a Velazquez masterpiece with hammers.

Arse No1 was glorious posterior of the Rokeby Venus portrayed with effortless genius by the 17th century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. Arse No2 and Arse No3 were identified by Just Stop Oil as activists Hanan, 22, and Harrison, 20.

Obviously annoyed at being bumped off the news agenda by much higher-profile irritants like the Pro-Palestinian marchers who have taken up residence on the nation’s front pages JSO apparently decided they needed to annoy the British public with an ugly stupid hammer attack on a random work of art painted in 1647. 

The contrast of the sublime beauty of the 375-year-old painting with the ugly stupidity of the attack could barely have been more marked.

Human genius face-to-face with human numptyness.

In all honesty the attack was a bit of an embarrassingly lame, underwhelming affair. When I first caught a breaking headline about this news story I imagined sledge-hammers being wielded and appalling artistic destruction.

In fact the JSO children seemed to be using those dinky little hammers you used to get in a box of Thorntons Special Toffee.

Awwwww!

Still, crime is about intent as much as outcome and the fact the Rokeby Venus will probably just need its protective glass replacing should not prevent whoever was behind the attack (that okay Lawyers?) from eating porridge for a few months.

Just Stop Oil’s cringingly fatuous explanation for why they targeted the painting – formal title The Toilet of Venus) is that it was also slashed by  suffragette Mary Richardson in March 1914.

Following today’s stunt an impossibly pompous Hanan, who really needs to listen harder in double history, said: “Women did not get the vote by voting; it is time for deeds not words.”

No they didn’t young lady.

They didn’t get it by maliciously damaging works of art either if we’re honest.

They got it because of the most godawful mechanised war in history from 1914-1918 which necessarily changed the status of women in British society.

Somebody may or may not end up doing a few months inside for today’s attack.

Me? I’d just make them read a few more history books.