There are many reasons why someone might want to throw a cream pie at Michael O’Leary, the motormouth boss of budget airline Ryanair. Usually, the only satisfying thing about a Ryanair flight is the price. (And even then prices have been going up.) Then there’s his one-note Remoanerism, his contemptuous comments over the years about Brexit-voting Brits. And his contempt for some of his own workers. But that’s not why O’Leary was pied by some activists in Brussels today, as he handed in a petition to the European Commission, calling for flights over Europe to be better protected from air-traffic-control strikes. No, they’re angry – apparently – that his firm exists at all.

‘Stop the pollution of the f*****g planes’, two women shouted, as they pressed two paper plates of cream, one after the other, into two sides of O’Leary’s mug. While it’s unclear if they belong to any particular eco-group, their message is easy enough to intuit: how dare this man offer ordinary people a few weeks in the sun. What an evil, climate-killing endeavour!

Now, pie-throwing – like milkshaking or egging – is a completely juvenile form of protest. There’s nothing big nor clever about it. I also understand why it often unsettles those on the receiving end of it – particularly controversial people in the public eye, who might have reason to fear a stranger flinging any kind of substance at them. (For what it’s worth, O’Leary dealt with the silliness well – brushing off the mess, while telling the assembled media that he loved cream cakes.) But I’m particularly struck by their motive in flinging those pies.

‘Stop the pollution of the f*****g planes’, two women shouted

For if Michael O’Leary has a redeeming feature it is that his airline, alongside EasyJet and Wizz and all the other budget firms, began a revolution in air travel, opening it up to ordinary people for the first time. In the space of a generation they helped to turn flying from the preserve of the well-off to something accessible to almost anyone. The beaches and cities and landscapes of Europe were suddenly on offer to Brits who before would have to make do with a week in Skegness. (No offence to Skegness.) And yet it is this, in essence, that these protesters hate him for – alongside his many other eco-haters.

Indeed, greens have long held a red-hot loathing for budget airlines – in large part, it seems, because of the people who tend to fly with them. Way back in 2006, in an article in the Guardian, Green MP Caroline Lucas decried all those ‘cheap stag nights in Riga’. Lucas effectively called for the era of affordable air travel to end, insisting that politicians not ‘shy away from the politically unpalatable task of reversing aviation’s climate impact’. The caricature of gammony Brits tearing around Europe’s historic capitals, buzzed on pints and oblivious to the architecture, has long haunted these snobs’ nightmares.

Now, greens are in danger of getting their wish – to the detriment of the vast majority of holidaymakers. ‘No more cheap flights is the new reality for air travel’, reports a recent piece in Bloomberg, noting that ‘climate-compliance laws’ aimed at ‘decarbonising’ air travel are tightening across Europe and will soon push up prices beyond the reach of working-class people, only a few decades after they became in-reach.

If you needed any more proof of what a thoroughly elitist movement environmentalism is, greens’ hatred for cheap flights is surely it. Here’s hoping those pie-wielding greens don’t get their way in the end – and that their crowning achievement remains forcing us all to temporarily feel sorry for Michael O’Leary.