The climate protesters who threw soup at a van Gogh painting. (And why they won’t stop.)

Britain is cracking down on demonstrators who believe they’re saving the planet.

By KARL MATHIESEN
in London

^{Illustration by Neil Jamieson for POLITICO}

On Oct. 14, 2022, Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer walked into London’s National Gallery art museum, passing under the imposing portico that crouches at the head of Trafalgar Square. They were carrying two cans of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup, superglue and bread — which they had no intention of eating. 

They walked through the groups of late-season tourists, through halls filled with works by history’s most revered painters. Eventually, they arrived in room 43, which held Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers,” the Dutch artist’s painting of a vase of yellow blossoms. The work is an icon so valuable it has no price. It was shortly to be the target of one of the most famous — or infamous — climate protests of all time.

The pair paused. A group of school children wearing high-vis vests sat in front of the painting, drawing it. Nerves shot through Holland and Plummer. This was not in the plan. There were journalists planted in the room. There was a press release schedule. The tension and fear of getting caught was rising. But neither wanted to ruin the school trip, nor risk getting soup on any of the students. 

Plummer and Holland pretended to look at the paintings as five minutes passed. Then 10.

Finally, the children began to move on. Holland and Plummer stripped off their heavy coats to reveal white t-shirts with “JUST STOP OIL” written in black capital letters. Holland was on autopilot, trying to breathe slowly.

Standing a few feet from the painting, the pair peeled back the lids. The soup hit the painting with a splat. Someone in the room yelled, as though they had seen a child fall from a height. Plummer fumbled with the glue and almost got stuck to the soup tin. The soup slid downwards, obscuring the vase and almost all of the sunflowers.

Then, kneeling with one hand now glued to the wall, Plummer bellowed into the waiting cameras: “What is worth more: art or life?”

The room was quickly cleared. Gallery workers rushed in. They lifted the painting from the wall, over the heads of the activists, who were now sitting in a puddle of orange soup like a pair of croutons.

“We knew it was protected by glass,” Holland said, to no one in particular. “We wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t.”

During the planning, Plummer and Holland, who were 21 and 20 years old at the time, never considered the stunt would land them in prison. It was just a bit of soup on glass, after all.

That expectation was not unreasonable. British law has traditionally made room for acts of desperation and conscience, even ones that might normally be considered criminal. Activists who attempted to sabotage warplanes or halted migrant deportation flights have escaped either without conviction or got very lenient sentences, as courts recognized they were acting in the belief that their actions were just. 

And Just Stop Oil protestors believe there is no cause more existential than trying to stop the burning of the world. “The thing that’s kept me going on this path has been the fact that I really want children,” is how Holland explained it. “I was raised in a big family. I want a family. I want a home with a garden and children and pets. I want that life. And I’m never going to have that unless we win this fight.”

Despite the public sharing this deep concern about climate change, opinion has swung against a five-year-long campaign of disruption and attention-seeking capers by groups like Just Stop Oil. And the United Kingdom’s political and judicial authorities are determined to bring the protests to an end.

As demonstrators have shut down freeways and airports, disrupted sporting events and assaulted cultural icons like Stonehenge or van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” the previous U.K. government ratcheted up efforts to make them stop, pushing for tougher policing and passing laws restricting the right to protest. Meanwhile, courts have cut off traditional avenues of defense, making it harder for law-breaking activists to escape punishment.

In the past few years, more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested and charged, even for minor offenses that once would never have found their way into courtrooms. There are now 26 Just Stop Oil activists in jail, according to the group. And as of last week, when a judge sentenced them to prison for the soup throwing, Plummer and Holland were among them.

Just Stop Oil’s recruitment drive

Holland’s journey from quiet bookworm to incarcerated criminal took a decisive turn four months before the soup-throwing, when Just Stop Oil turned up in Newcastle.

Holland had never been a rule-abider. Growing up in a small village in a wooded corner of northwest England, they were happy. Holland’s childhood was spent, largely, in the forest, or with their head in a book. (Both Holland and Plummer use “they” and “them” pronouns.) 

As a reader, Holland fell most deeply for characters with a penchant for turmoil and revolution. But during their late teens, Holland’s social media feed gave them a sense that the world outside was even darker than the imagined worlds of their books. Holland kept a journal of anxious thoughts hidden under their mattress.

In 2020, Holland arrived in Newcastle, a city in England’s northeast, to study poetry at university. It was the depths of the Covid pandemic. Locked down and stuck in their room in student accommodation, Holland lay sleepless and alone, eating endless Aldi frozen meals and potato waffles, scrolling through Instagram watching people posting their lockdown cooking brags. 

As the scrolling went on, the algorithm began to reflect and feed the collective fear of Holland’s friends about the breakdown of the natural world. Rainforests without rain. Anger about a stolen future. The walls of Holland’s room were an almost unbearable purple. It felt like being in the path of a great dark ship, too late to swim out of the way.

Then, in the spring of 2022, a friend from university told Holland he’d been involved in the blockade of an oil terminal with a new group of hardcore activists called Just Stop Oil. Intrigued, Holland went along to a recruiting talk on campus in May.

The talk was one of hundreds of similar sessions Just Stop Oil have held around the country. Alex De Koning — a sweet and goofy Scottish PhD student, who was researching a process that turns food waste into hydrogen — spoke first and laid out the science of climate change and its dire predictions for life and civilization. Holland and De Koning got together a few months later and are now a couple.

Another activist spoke about how Just Stop Oil was part of a genealogy of activism that includes the suffragettes and the Black Panthers — groups that broke the law and were broadly despised among the public of their time but helped drive some of the great social changes of the 20th century. 

(The suffragettes, who were campaigning for the right to vote for women more than 100 years ago, were far more radical than climate protesters today, smashing windows, bombing churches and, in one case, taking a knife to a painting of a nude Venus by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. The Black Panthers, who advocated for Black rights, encouraged their members to openly carry firearms and exchanged gunfire with police.)

The activists in Newcastle outlined the “radical flank effect,” a phenomenon first described in the 1980s by the American sociologist Herbert H. Haines in which jarring, destructive or unpopular acts of civil disorder legitimized more moderate positions, ultimately helping to bring about change. 

Just Stop Oil was literally trying to be unpopular.

Holland was sold. They had taken part in the school strikes climate change movement inspired by Greta Thunberg, which at the time had seemed transgressive and fresh. But Holland felt the marches had achieved little. The possibility of radical action — of doing something — offered a way out of the helplessness and darkness, which had lingered since the dog days of the pandemic.

A week after the meeting, Holland was in London, training to give the same recruitment talks. By August, they had been arrested for the first time. 

From climate depression to radical activism

In early October, Holland was on a roadblock in Trafalgar Square. There were protesters there Holland hadn’t seen before. That wasn’t unusual given that hundreds had answered the recruitment drive. But Holland was transfixed and intimidated by one particular newcomer and their easy confidence, dazzling outfit and bright pink hair swept back to reveal the roots. It was Plummer.

Plummer came up and painted glitter on Holland’s face. The pair were later hauled off the road by the police and locked up. In the cells, Holland glimpsed Plummer walking past to make a phone call. Now dressed in jail grays but still covered in glitter, Plummer’s face shone with a best-day-of-my-life grin.

Plummer, like Holland, was coming out of a dark place. In 2019, a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that heating the planet by 2 degrees Celsius — the world is currently on track for 2.5 C or more — would lead millions to suffer or die as the world became markedly less habitable. Plummer could not stop thinking about it.

A sense of doom hung over Plummer through their final years in the hothouse of a high-end London private school. Plummer went on climate marches but regarded the mass demonstrations more as a palliative for personal dread than a force for change. They were aware of Extinction Rebellion and other groups that were beginning to mount more belligerent campaigns but felt too afraid to get arrested. 

It was after Plummer left home to begin a math and computer science degree at Manchester University that the dam broke. They plunged into a mental health crisis and dropped out in the spring of 2022.

That July, the temperature in the United Kingdom reached 40 C, smashing the all-time record. Homes on the outskirts of London burned. 

Just Stop Oil had started a new campaign of rolling roadblocks and other eye-catching, confrontational protests. Swallowing fears of arrest, Plummer signed up in August. Within a week of joining, they had been locked up three times — twice for helping disable petrol pumps at London filling stations.

Something shifted in Plummer during that week. The protests felt so right. All doubt vanished. After spending some time in cells, Plummer even realized they could handle prison — almost enjoyed it. 

A few days after the Trafalgar Square roadblock, on October 12, Plummer received a series of texts and voicemails from Holland asking them to call back urgently. There was something big happening, a protest so outrageous and weird that only a few people in Just Stop Oil knew about it. Holland couldn’t say anything in a text. Just call. 

When they spoke, Plummer had agreed to participate before Holland finished explaining.

Target van Gogh: Scouting out the National Gallery

The next day, Plummer and Holland visited the gallery for a recce. They carried soup in their backpacks to test the security protocols, checked out the positions of guards and noted the glass protection on the painting. They stood for a long time, staring at the sunflowers.

That night, the pair stayed in an Airbnb that Just Stop Oil was using as a safe house. The group was under pressure from the police; surveillance, infiltration and house raids were on everyone’s minds.

Holland and Plummer took tins of soup into the shower and, laughing at the absurdity of the scene, practiced throwing the contents against the shower screen. Plummer stripped down to their underwear, not wanting to ruin their clothes. The soup was best thrown over arm, with a short backlift.

They both committed to memory the short speeches they had written for the next day. They hoped the protest would go huge online. If it did, they would have just seconds to deliver their message: Why are you more shocked by the apparent vandalism of a painting than the industrial sacrifice of the entire planet?

Just Stop Oil needed a hit. Media coverage of the movement had begun to taper off. Holland and some others, whom they have declined to name, had been kicking around ideas to get back into the headlines.

One suggestion was to spraypaint the statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square with the group’s distinctive electric orange. But Churchill, a national father figure who held hierarchical views on race and imperialism, was heavily guarded. And new laws introduced after the Black Lives Matter protests meant the prison sentences for damaging monuments could be huge. Plus, Holland said, while Churchill was a “rightful” target for defacement, he “wasn’t related enough to the climate crisis.”

The original artwork target was Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” Holland now thinks that would have been a mistake. 

Warhol’s work is cool and knowing, while “Sunflowers” is an offering of sweetness. The Dutchman painted them in 1888 to adorn a bedroom in his yellow house in Provence that he’d prepared for the artist Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh wished his friend would decamp permanently from Paris so they could paint together in the light of southern France. But the vulnerable, dying flowers were a portent. Gauguin did not stick around — precipitating the breakdown and self-mutilation that would leave the mentally-ill van Gogh missing a part of his ear. An assault on the “Sunflowers” would be deeply shocking.

They chose soup, rather than paint, for two reasons. It seemed stranger. And it symbolized the tinned goods at food banks that millions of Brits were relying on during an energy crisis caused by high fossil fuel prices.

The day of the protest, Holland and Plummer were nervous. Holland couldn’t eat breakfast. Too much coffee produced an anxiety spike. The pair sat in a park for a while, trying to calm down. “I want to just do it,” said Plummer, shoulders shivering.

Those nerves took over once they had thrown the soup. Plummer went off script in their speech. Holland never got to say their part because the guards had cleared the room while Plummer was still talking about dying mangroves.

In the minutes that followed, gallery staff carefully removed the canvas from its frame to check no soup had seeped behind the glass. It hadn’t. The painting was unharmed. Holland stared at the back of van Gogh’s masterpiece. It felt like a special honor.

Other staff came through the room, examining Holland and Plummer as though they were a vulgar new acquisition. 

None spoke to them before the police arrived, unglued Holland and Plummer and took them into custody. Save one, a well-dressed man who approached them as they knelt on the floor. He stood over them, looking down. He put his hand on his chin and shook his head.

“You stupid bitches,” he said. (The National Gallery did not respond to a request for comment.)

Framed: After the ‘Sunflowers’ 

Holland and Plummer spent the day after their arrest locked in cells with only old newspapers to read. In that information vacuum, they convinced themselves that, like so many other protests before, theirs had been a dud. Far from it. Footage of them was ricocheting across the internet, viewed millions, then tens of millions of times. Newspapers around the world wrote breathless, furious articles. 

Eventually, the pair were transferred to court for a plea hearing. Waiting to be booked in, Holland felt as though the police and other officials were staring. One said: “Oh, so it’s the celebrity.” The scale of the impact began to dawn.

Holland was handed a “distraction pack” — something prisoners in the U.K. can request to pass the time in custody. It included a lead pencil and a notepad. On the pages was a picture of a goldfish with a shark’s fin strapped to its back. “MINDSET IS EVERYTHING,” it said. 

That is “easy enough to say when you aren’t a world famous criminal,” Holland wrote on the page, before filling it with a long stanza justifying the stunt. “I’ve just heard that the painting itself is completely fine … When the disparity between those who swore to protect us, and those of us that they have neglected is so stark, who could see my act of fear, anger and desperation as anything less than fair?”

Released on bail, Plummer and Holland rode the tube to a safe house, still wearing jail clothes. People stared. One sent surreptitious photos of them laughing on the train to a tabloid, sparking new outraged headlines. Another person yelled that they were the “scum of the Earth.” And one passenger asked if they could take Holland and Plummer to the pub and buy them a pint — and they did. 

They didn’t have their phones, but Holland had memorized their mother’s number and called her to share the news. Their mother, whom POLITICO has chosen not to name, answered the phone in tears.

The family had found out what Holland had done when a reporter had turned up at their home, knocking on the neighbors’ doors, asking questions. “How could you have not known this would happen?” she asked Holland, furious.

Holland burst into tears. They had barely thought about it.

The next day, Holland received a text from their father.

“You have made your mother’s position as Head Teacher of a Catholic Primary School very difficult,” he wrote. Holland’s brother, who was training with the Royal Air Force, had been ordered to see his commanding officer. One of Holland’s sisters was glued to social media, fighting with critics of her sibling.

“We have had to make arrangements to try and protect [Holland’s other, youngest sister, 14] from the backlash she will undoubtedly receive at school tomorrow. I have never before been ashamed by the actions of one of my children, there is much that I now need to put right. So I am not in a good place right now.” He signed off with an “x.” The two wouldn’t speak again properly for eight months.

“I will always regret putting them through what I did,” Holland said. 

Yet this notoriety and blowback was the entire point of the protest, and it followed Holland and Plummer as their case made its way through the legal system. Plummer especially, with their shock of pink hair and repeated subsequent acts of public disorder, became one of the most recognized faces of Just Stop Oil. 

Holland, on the other hand, shrank from view, working behind the scenes to raise money for the organization. “After a long period of not speaking to me, eventually my mom told me the only way to actually prove that I loved and cared about them was to not get arrested again,” Holland said. 

Abandoning the front lines was Holland’s “biggest source of guilt.” They hoped that by walking the straight path they could spare their family the additional embarrassment and stress of their child being incarcerated. After all, the painting was undamaged.

But there was another thing Holland and Plummer had failed to consider. Even as the pair were being detached from the gallery wall by the police, the painting’s frame had been taken down and carried to a room away from public view called “Lower Conservation.” 

The frame around “Sunflowers” is older than the painting itself. A rare and intact 17th Century antique bought specifically for the painting in 1999, its timeworn coloration matched the flowers. It was thought to be the rustic and unadorned style that van Gogh himself would have preferred. 

Isabella Kocum, a conservator and artist, cleaned off the soup. But she was devastated to see that the acid inside it had acted as a paint stripper, eating away the silver leaf, clay undercoat and the irreplaceable patina built up over centuries.

Gabriel Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, had made it clear he wanted the painting returned to the wall that day if possible. Over the next couple of hours, Kocum lovingly repainted the frame and “Sunflowers” went straight back on display. 

Holland and Plummer were charged with criminal damage to the frame. Because the gallery estimated that the damage done by the soup had devalued the frame by around £10,000, their case was sent straight to the Crown Court, the courts reserved for serious offenses.

Hoffman’s bargain: The death of necessity

If Holland and Plummer expected leniency, they were counting on a history of jurisprudence that has protected the actions of generations of protesters. 

When determining verdicts and setting sentences, British judges and juries have long been willing to take a generous look at the reasons behind a potentially criminal act.

One of the first cases law students in the country learn regards the shipwreck of a small yacht that foundered off the West African coast in 1884.

The ship, Mignonette, shared its name with a condiment, which was unfortunate given what would transpire between its four-man crew. After more than two weeks drifting in a lifeboat, starved, crazed and near dead of thirst, two of the crew had, by their own admission, killed the 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker and cannibalized his body.

Put on trial on their return to England, the survivors pleaded that their actions had avoided a greater evil (the death of four men instead of one). This did not justify murder, the court decided. But while the sailors were found guilty, they were allowed to walk free. 

Before and since, protesters and activists have sometimes deployed a defense called “necessity” — that some situations are of such urgency it’s required to break the law. On occasion, juries have been swayed and allowed defendants to walk. In other cases, when the accused were found guilty, the courts have taken activists’ motivation into account when meting out punishment.

That edifice began to crumble in 2003, when a group of anti-Iraq war protesters attempted to sabotage U.S. Air Force bombers and their equipment, days before they flew to Baghdad. Their team of barristers, which included the future British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, used the necessity defense, arguing they were trying to stop the planes from committing war crimes. 

Two of the five were acquitted. Starmer’s client was let off after the jury failed to return a verdict. The other two were convicted in 2007, but one of them received a conditional discharge and £250 in costs. The other was briefly placed under curfew.

The result was a victory for the activists, but it planted the seed for the demise of the necessity defense: An opinion on the case issued by one of the U.K.’s most senior judges Leonard Hoffman.

In what became known as Hoffman’s bargain, the judge argued that if protesters “behave with a sense of proportion” without causing “excessive damage or inconvenience,” they should expect police, prosecutors and judges to punish them with “restraint.” However they could not expect to get away scot-free. People couldn’t just go around breaking the law because they believed in their cause.

Hoffman’s opinion was non-binding, and courts continued to allow the necessity defense well into the 2010s. In 2008, six Greenpeace activists who wrote “GORDON” in giant letters on a power station smokestack were let off after they argued they were acting to prevent the far greater harm of climate change. 

In 2017, activists physically blocked a plane from leaving the U.K. with a cabin full of migrants the government had planned to deport. They were convicted on terrorism-related charges two years later but given no jail time after the judge ruled that their protest was motivated by “genuine reasons.”

Their convictions were overturned on a technicality in 2021, but the Court of Appeal decided it had had enough of the necessity defense. In its decision, it ruled that Hoffman’s view should henceforth be considered binding. A protester’s motivation, no matter how noble, should no longer be considered exculpatory.

For protesters, the necessity defense is now “close to extinction,” said Raj Chada, one of the U.K.’s most experienced defenders of activists and Holland’s lawyer in the “Sunflowers” case.

The government strikes back

The death of the necessity defense was part of a broader crackdown on protests, driven largely by public and media outrage over the actions of activists like Holland and Plummer.

At the time of the soup-throwing, the government, then led by a series of Conservative prime ministers, was under huge pressure to stamp out the disruption. 

As demonstrators from Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other groups clogged up the courts, a succession of attorneys general and ministers pushed police to intervene more forcefully and asked courts to review lenient rulings. Judges further restricted other legal avenues, including the ability of protesters to defend themselves using their rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

“The shifts are subtle but defenses that were available and being pleaded in protest cases only a few years ago are now simply not available,” said Steven Cammiss, a senior lecturer at Birmingham Law School who has closely studied the evolution of the treatment of activists.

The government also passed two new laws —  the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 — with the explicit goal of preventing protesters from causing widespread disruption or locking or gluing themselves in place. 

It wasn’t long before the new laws began to bite. In July, five Just Stop Oil protesters — including the founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam — were handed four- or five-year terms for having organized a rolling four-day blockade of the M25, Britain’s busiest motorway. Michel Forst, a U.N. official charged with advocating for “environmental defenders,” was at the trial and called the sentence a “dark day for peaceful environmental protest.”

These laws have also affected other protest groups, some of which use far more benign tactics than Just Stop Oil. In May 2023, the new laws and police powers were used to arrest anti-monarchy protesters who were planning to hold up signs saying “Not My King” on the streets during the coronation of King Charles III. Between October 2023 and March 2024, the London Metropolitan Police made 216 arrests in connection to pro-Palestine marches. According to data released in response to a freedom of information request, more than a third were made under the Public Order Act of 2023. 

What to do about Just Stop Oil, and protest in general, now falls to Starmer and his new Labour government.

Before politics, Starmer spent a career as a defense barrister, then the director of public prosecutions, in which he carefully weighed the right to protest with the impact it can have on the public. 

Just Stop Oil has called on the new government to cease locking up protesters and focus on fixing the climate. But if they expect a similar balancing act from Starmer as prime minister, they might be disappointed. Starmer has called the group “contemptible” and “pathetic.”

‘Perhaps we would all be throwing soup’

By the time Plummer and Holland went on trial in July, the new approach to protesters was in full effect. And the judge in charge, Christopher Hehir, had shown himself eager to apply it. It was Hehir who presided over Hallam’s case and handed him five years. 

Before the jury entered the dreary courtroom by the southern bank of the River Thames, Hehir sparred with Holland’s barrister Chada over the defenses he would allow into the court.

It was very much a one-sided battle. A recent decision by the Court of Appeal had granted judges the exclusive right to rule on some of these matters, and Hehir was unimpressed by Chada’s arguments. 

Chada, his black hair graying around the temples and peeking from beneath his wig, urged the judge to consider Holland and Plummer’s freedoms of expression and assembly — often called the right to protest. He downplayed the damage to the frame and argued that the action was non-violent.

Hehir wasn’t having it. How could damage to a masterpiece’s antique frame be insignificant? he asked. As to the question of violence, “I can find no sensible reason to distinguish the throwing of the contents of a tin of soup over another person from the throwing of the same over another person’s property,” the judge wrote in a note.

Hehir explicitly dismissed the necessity defense, or any other that spoke to Holland and Plummer’s motivations. He forbade the pair from talking to the jury about climate change or trying to justify their actions with their desperation to avert catastrophe. 

During the trial, he repeatedly reminded the jury to disregard the reasons behind their actions. The only defense he allowed the defendants to make was that they had not been knowingly reckless when they damaged the frame. 

Plummer, who represented themselves in the case, nonetheless urged the jury to take into account the pair’s motivation. 

“You have the absolute right to acquit,” Plummer told the jury in a 19 minute appeal at the end of the trial, which was transcribed by Just Stop Oil’s legal support team. “My conscience led me to take this action, because I can’t sit by and do nothing whilst we watch innocent people suffer as a result of decisions made by people in power. I urge you to use your conscience when deciding on the verdict.”

While juries are indeed free to follow their hearts and disregard a judge’s guidance, Hehir insisted they shouldn’t, musing that “if we were allowed to break the law when we liked on the basis of our conscience, then perhaps we would all be throwing soup.”

The jury sided with Hehir, returning a guilty verdict after just over two hours of deliberation. Before he released Holland and Plummer to await sentencing, he warned them to expect jail time. 

Chada, Holland’s lawyer, was dismayed, but not surprised. 

“I’ve done this job for this particular area for around 15, 16 years. And it wasn’t until 2019 that I had my first client go to prison,” he said. “Two years ago, there’s no way this would have gone to prison. Absolutely no way.” 

Awaiting sentence: ‘Conflicted’

On the day of the sentencing in mid-September, police blocked off the roads surrounding the courthouse. A few hundred bedraggled supporters held a silent vigil in the rain and wind.

The crackdown on illegal protests had taken a toll on Just Stop Oil. Much of the group’s energy had been redirected into supporting members in prison or before the courts. Some of its most prominent members were in jail.

For many of these activists, the cases against them had become acts of protest and self-sacrifice. Plummer was actually hoping for a harsh sentence, convinced it could turn public opinion, or at least highlight a system that prioritized putting activists in jail above preventing the planet from burning. 

Plummer had spent much of the time since the trial behind bars. Five days after it had ended, they had marched into Heathrow Airport’s departures area with a fire hydrant full of orange paint, shooting it over walls, floors and the televisions with flight information on them. Arrested again, Plummer, whose rap sheet now includes at least five major court cases, didn’t even bother applying for bail. On the day before the sentencing, they turned 23 in prison. 

Holland’s feelings were more complicated. There seemed to be a chance they could escape jail. Since the trial, they had not reoffended. Holland’s mum had written to the judge to beg for clemency. A probation officer had recommended they receive a non-custodial sentence. A prison sentence for Holland would do more to expose the injustice than one for Plummer. It would be the “final nail” in Hehir’s credibility, Holland said.

But Holland was scared. Of being lonely. Of being unable to cope. Of heaping more pain on their family. Those relationships had begun to heal. A summer camping trip to Wales had felt almost normal, with Holland’s siblings ribbing the criminal in the family. But it felt like the wounds could easily reopen.

Holland and De Koning, the Just Stop Oil activist who had introduced them to the cause before they started a romance, were also struggling with the prospect of a long time apart. The couple tried their best to see the funnier side of the situation. In the flat they share in Newcastle they hung a print of the “Sunflowers” above the loo.

In the months before the sentencing, time became precious. They wrote a pre-prison bucket list and worked through most of it. They went ax throwing, walking in the woods, on day trips to Berwick-upon-Tweed and York. They had movie nights curled up under blankets. They celebrated their second anniversary  — a week early because the day of the sentencing was the actual anniversary — with a pub lunch. De Koning bought Holland a Nintendo Wii and they played Mario Tennis. Holland bought De Koning an engraved backgammon set.

The day before the sentencing Holland and De Koning had lunch in a Japanese restaurant in central London. The couple talked about a shared dream of living in a cottage on Loch Lomond and the screenplay they had been writing together — a screwball comedy about a bunch of gangsters who try to unionize. 

Then they talked about the sentencing, the possibility that Holland would go to prison the next day. “You feel a bit conflicted,” De Koning said to Holland. “So I’m conflicted.” 

Holland gave a small nod.

Just Stop Oil’s future generations

In court, both of Holland’s parents were in the public gallery. Before Holland entered the dock for the final time, their father held them for a long time.

The sentencing dragged on as Chada again tried to appeal to Hehir for leniency. Plummer used the time allotted to them to attack the proceedings as political. 

Wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, once-pink hair dye faded in prison to a bleached greenish blonde, Plummer spoke slowly, detailing the facts of the climate crisis, the famines and forced migration. They wanted to show that by rejecting their defense of necessity, Hehir had willfully blinded the jury and himself to the need to act. 

“In this courtroom, all the grief and pain of those real lived experiences of the climate crisis were deemed an irrelevant ideology,” Plummer told Hehir.

“I’ve found peace in acting on my conscience,” Plummer added. “If you think that taking an authoritarian approach today will somehow stop people standing up for justice, I believe you will be proved wrong.”

Eight minutes into Plummer’s speech, Hehir had grown visibly irritated. Plummer’s voice wavered a little as he fidgeted. Shortly afterward he interrupted. “This isn’t helping you Miss Plummer,” he said. “I’ve heard it all before.”

Then it was time to deliver the sentence. In his closing statement, Hehir said he was punishing the pair not just for the damage to the frame but for the harm they might have done to the painting. “How could they conceivably know and guarantee that the glass would do its job?” he said.

As he read out the sentences — two years for Plummer and 20 months for Holland — Holland’s mom shook her head. Holland was very still. De Koning looked dazed. “I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. I imagine when I get back to the flat …” he trailed off.

Before Holland and Plummer were led away, they hugged. After the court had cleared out, only Holland’s parents were left in the public gallery. Holding one another. 

Across the Thames, van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” was still on display, now the star attraction of a blockbuster show celebrating the National Gallery’s 200th birthday that opened less than a fortnight before the sentencing. 

In one of those moments that makes the art world breathless — thanks in part to the complexity and expense of shipping priceless objects across oceans — the piece had been paired with another van Gogh painting of sunflowers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

On the wall above them, the show’s curator had placed a line from a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo: “In a painting I’d like to say something consoling.” On the National Gallery’s version, Kocum’s restoration of the frame was perfect from a distance. But a close inspection revealed pale streaks where the soup had etched through the patina.

Hehir had said he hoped his sentences would dissuade climate protesters from further lawlessness. However, he was quickly disappointed. 

An hour after Holland and Plummer were led away to prison, Mary Patricia Somerville, 77, Ludi Simpson, 71, and Phil Green, 24, entered the exhibition. 

Opening jars, they threw what appeared to be soup on both paintings. Moving deliberately, they removed their jackets to reveal t-shirts with the same black writing: “JUST STOP OIL.” 

As soup once again streamed down the sunflowers, Green cried out: “Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.” And then they sat down together, cross legged, and waited to be arrested.