Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions.

And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness the photographs in the newspapers today of Extinction Rebellion campaigners at Westminster adorned in ghoulish fancy-dress and looking like pale vampires. And also true to the stereotype of the wacky semi-religious fanatics, the activists are duly showing signs of divisions in their ranks.

As the Times reports today, there has emerged hints of a split in Just Stop Oil, disagreements as to whether it will disruptively protest tomorrow’s London Marathon. JSO activist Phoebe Plummer, the purple-haired campaigner and now television talking-head who first came to public consciousness for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, last night told TalkTV that the group would not cause chaos at the race, even though, she hastened to add with typical understatement: ‘we have a government who is actively planning the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.’ The official JSO Twitter account consequently posted a message under a recording of Plummer’s interview saying: ‘I think Phoebe missed the meeting last night’.

Whichever wing of the JSO will prevail tomorrow, one other radical green faction that promises to be in attendance at the marathon, Extinction Rebellion, has definitely foresworn disruptive intervention. XR, as they are also known, used to be infamous for their direct action, with a peculiar penchant for gluing themselves to roads and trains. Their rally of 2019 brought large parts of London to a standstill, with streets closed, buses diverted, and more than 1,000 arrested. They have since concluded that such tactics alienates the public. As Pete Richards, a veteran Extinction Rebellion activist told The Times today, he thought the disruption of four years ago was right for the time, but, of today, ‘I think we need to try a different method.’

Extinction Rebellion’s shift towards more peaceful means represents the inevitable dialectic of revolutionary movements, as seen in the past in the PLO’s willingness to sit down and talk, and for the Provisional IRA to lay down their guns and notionally pursue democratic means. Also inherent to this dialect is that once a mainstream movement decides to embrace peace, the fanatical purists will split and continue to pursue more direct means – as we saw with emergence of Hamas and in the Real IRA in the 1990s.

Just Stop Oil came to existence in the spirit of this dialectic, being an offshoot of the now more emollient XR, a group that has even vowed to help guard the London Marathon. Thus the prospect now of a split in Just Stop Oil would come as no surprise. It’s utterly precedented.

Whatever transpires with the shifting contours of radical environmentalism, the rhetoric of both radical groups should still serve as a warning. Inherently purist, non-democratic ideologies can seldom be reasoned with. The radical green movement is absolutist, apocalyptic, their fundamental demands immediate and non-negotiable. The tendency to fissure is the logical side-effect of half-fanatical, half-risible movements given to such hyperbolic overstatements as: ‘We will be taking more radical action because the clock is ticking for every human and non-human alive today’ (XR), and: ‘To allow new oil and gas is the greatest criminal act in human history’ (JSO).

In the aftermath of Monday’s storming of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, and asked about further protests at sporting events, the Just Stop Oil group responded: ‘there will be ongoing disruption until the Government meets our demand to end new oil and gas.’ Such a declaration does indeed sound like something Reg from the People’s Front of Judea would have set forth, but the language also brings to mind the statements issued by the IRA in the 1970s.

If JSO seem to be playing at soldiers, the sugared statements of XR ‘moderates’ should also be treated with caution. While activists have said that the four days of protest over this weekend ‘are not intended for public disruption’, they have promised ‘the greatest acts of civil disobedience in this country’s history’ within three months if their demands are not met by Monday at 5pm. The overtones here are again familiar. As one man once said about the extremists in his wings: ‘they haven’t gone away you know.’