Who could get really cross with the bad boys of eco-action: those scruffy ruffians who raid parliament or give Winston Churchill a grass mohican?

When Otis Ferry and his merry men got let off lightly for rampaging into the House of Commons to disrupt the hunting debate (which their pro-hunting lot lost anyway), I didn’t berate them like the Labour peer, Tony Banks. He thought the leniency of Bow Street magistrates court an outrage - £350 fines for each of the eight wealthy defendants. But I thought the whole episode had a chaotic English charm.

Among its plus points, the bust-in to parliament gave the rest of the country lots of free reality-TV-style entertainment - even more than when Fathers 4 Justice poured purple powder on Tony Blair from the visitor’s gallery. When it turned out that one of the eight offenders was Bryan Ferry’s son - the 22-year-old Master of Hounds of the South Shropshire Hunt - and another was Prince William’s friend - the 28-year-old professional polo player Luke Tomlinson - it was manna from heaven for a nation that survives on celebrity gossip. Ferry Junior got a personal boost too. A boy who hadn’t exactly made his mark on the world suddenly found himself in Tatler magazine’s Little Black Book, rated nearly as datable as the actor Hugh Grant.

Not only did the protest not help the hunting lobby win the day in parliament, it also raised questions about whether parliament’s mediaeval security system - run since the fifteenth century by a sergeant-at-arms in knee breeches, who has to give permission for the police to enter the debating chamber - was really appropriate in the age of the suicide bomber. Being even indirectly responsible for updating such a picturesque piece of Olde English pageantry must have been the last thing these die-hard traditionalists wanted. Their worst enemy couldn’t hate them for an action so heroically unsuccessful.

It’s the virtuous eco-toffs I have a gripe with. The pure, lovely young greens, with their glowing eyes and healthy skin (from all those organic oatcakes and homegrown smoothies), who have devoted their lives to saving the world. The ones who sidle up to you at parties and - wham - before you know it you’re locked in a one-sided conversation (they talk, you listen) about the snow tiger, or the Bushman, or whatever else is the cause of the week. There’s nothing more sanctimonious, full of statistics and sleep inducing than an eco-toff in full cry.

Julia Stephenson, vegan heir to Vestey millions who posed nude in Tatler to promote animal welfare, describes herself and other “cool” vegans as “the armed guard of the vegetarian contingent”. In other words, smart eco-toffs have worked out an important lifestyle truth: being green is an alibi for being an unreconstructed Sloane Ranger.

Saving the world is such a big project - and all those snow tigers and Bushmen are so remote from any of the day-to-day business of living in the UK in the 21st century - that it’s a perfect excuse not to engage with ordinary people. The green cause reinforces the sense of entitlement that eco-toffs were born with. And it gives them a new kind of permission to sink back into the old-fashioned life of a country squire. If you are well off, and green, you can:

• Not worry about having dropped out of school or college without managing to get that geography degree.
  
• Retire to country estates and grow organic food out of reach of crisp-eating hoi polloi.
  
• Promote the luxury food products you’ve grown which most people can’t afford; bemoan the fact that the crisp-eating classes can’t afford them.
  
• Organise fund-raising parties at which other eco-toffs pay fortunes to hobnob, drink organic champagne and save Bushmen and tigers.
  
• Boast to anyone who will listen about the privilege of having so much money and so many contacts that you’re able devote yourself to saving the world.

  One rather wishes more eco-toffs would lose their cool and give in to their violent urges more often. It would be more honest, and a great deal more entertaining.

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