In late 2018, as Brexit was staggering through parliament, four activists—Ben Stewart, Oliver Knowles, James Sadri and Will Rose—began putting up billboards around London emblazoned with old tweets and quotes from Conservative and pro-Brexit politicians, exposing their hypocrisy. “We felt that the people who had promised the sunlit uplands weren’t being held to account,” Stewart tells me over Zoom, flanked by Sadri and Knowles (Rose is in Sweden). “So we became a guerrilla posting operation.” Photos of the billboards—beginning with David Cameron’s tweet pledging “stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband”—went viral, and within hours the group, Led By Donkeys, received tens of thousands of pounds in donations.
Since then, their campaigns have targeted political corruption, broken promises and plain ineptitude—most recently focusing on government links to Russian oligarchs. “We try and use humour to energise people not to feel so despondent and disheartened,” Sadri says. “It can be pretty bleak out there a lot of the time, and sometimes when you reclaim some of that power through humour, it can boost your morale. We can demand more of our politicians and create a healthier democracy.”
Are our politicians less trustworthy than they used to be? “There’s something about the digital age which allows politicians to overextend and make promises which, they hope, disappear into the digital ether,” Knowles says. “One of the things we’re trying to do is hold them accountable for their words.”
It’s not always about humour, though. In spring 2021, together with Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, they decorated a wall on the Albert Embankment with more than 150,000 red and pink hearts, each representing a victim of the pandemic. It was a political statement as well as a memorial, Stewart explains. “Families used it as a platform to demand an inquiry. Johnson was forced to go down to the wall—I don’t think he wanted to. And when he announced the Covid inquiry, he actually referenced his trip to the wall.”
The group arrived to paint the wall dressed like construction workers and carrying sandwich boards that gave the impression they had permission to be there. Once authorities realised what they were doing, they had already painted 1,000 hearts, and it was too late to stop them without appearing cruel.
The men, who all have a history of environmental activism, have used a number of tactics to avoid their protests being shut down. In 2019, they projected a critical message about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump onto Big Ben. When officers arrived, they quickly changed the slide to a message saying: “support your local police force.”
They have now turned their focus to Russia’s onslaught of Ukraine. On 24th February, the day the invasion began, they projected a video of a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist demanding tougher sanctions on Russia onto the wall of the Russian embassy. A spoof of Line of Duty, showing Johnson appearing to be grilled by Superintendent Ted Hastings from the police anti-corruption unit AC-12, has been shared on Twitter almost 20,000 times (“I’m interested in one thing, and one thing only, and that’s bent prime ministers”). They also projected a video of a Holocaust survivor imploring Johnson to let in more refugees onto the White Cliffs of Dover, in the same week that Ukrainian refugees had been turned away. The subsequent online publicity campaign “broke some rules around social media—that you can’t hold people’s attention [if it’s longer than] 90 seconds,” Stewart says. “But we give the audience more credit than that. We know people will stop scrolling and sit and consume a message—if it’s important enough.”
