Regrettably, we must conclude that our culture is being dictated by two-year-olds. I do not literally mean children of two years of age, some of whom are among my favourite conversationalists. I mean people with the mental age of a two-year-old. That is, people who have never been told ‘no’ and have gone through their adult lives behaving as such.

These are people who have never been told ‘no’ and have gone through their adult lives behaving as such

The rot began with the green lunatics. I’m all for saving the environment. Most people are. But the moment vandalism became an acceptable way to persuade people of your cause was where things went wrong.

There wasn’t nearly enough concern three years back when a London jury refused to convict six vandals from Extinction Rebellion. These men and women had taken hammers to the glass frontage of the Shell HQ in London. They were filmed doing so. One of them explained her thinking to the court: ‘I want to make cracks in a window and I want it to sound like a big event is happening.’ Another defendant said he had to attack the Shell building because ‘we do not have time to effect change through the usual process’.

In vain did the judge explain to the jury that their role was not to adjudicate whether the vandalism was ‘morally justified’. The jury decided that the vandalism had been in a good cause. So everyone was found not guilty and set free.

Similar decisions have arisen in the case of parallel causes. During the summer of 2020 a crowd of people in Bristol judged it to be within their rights to graffiti and tear down a statue they disapproved of before kicking it into the water. The hilarity and glee with which the statue of Edward Colston was treated – and the fact that it was exhibited lying on its side, still scrawled over, as a piece of ‘public art’, did not seem a good precedent.

For instance, I find almost every work of art put on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square to be offensive. Given the Bristol precedent, why should someone not lead a mob to tear one of those obscenities down? Would the authorities be as forgiving then? I would think not. But if you allow people to get away with things like that – refuse to say ‘no’ to them – you can always predict what will come next.

I noted here some while ago my admiration for the guards at the Uffizi in Florence who took a robust attitude towards some green kidults who turned up there to try to glue themselves to a Botticelli. I compared them favourably with the museum staff in our own country, because young zealots gluing themselves to parts of our national collection has become an almost weekly event in the UK. If you want to ‘stop oil’ then it seems to be accepted that you’ll soon need to glue yourself to a Van Gogh, ruin a frame here, throw a tin of tomato soup at a canvas there. While people do that, the museum staff will be found wandering aimlessly, speaking into their walkie talkies, because none of it really matters, does it? Why bother preserving the collection you’re paid to preserve? Besides, the two-year-olds want to have their way, and nobody is going to say no to them.

And so we come to the latest escalation in the great anti-oils mania. Last week a young woman walked into Trinity College Cambridge and made an assault on a beautiful 1914 portrait of Lord Balfour by the great Philip de Laszlo. The hooligan in question began by spray-painting over the work of art. Unlike some pieces in the national collection that have been attacked, this work did not have a glass cover in front of it, so this was a proper defacing. And then the knife came out and the vandal chose to take it up a notch. She slashed the canvas deeply in several directions, so that the ruined canvas flapped loose. She did all this while wearing a Mulberry backpack that apparently costs more than £1,000.

Reaction to the attack has been strangely unaware. Online commentators tried to come up with witty or offbeat things to say. The guardians of the painting released a statement merely saying that ‘Trinity College regrets the damage caused’ and offering help to the ‘community’. It was as though they were standing equidistant between the perpetrator and the work of art. As though this wasn’t a work of art in their care. Personally I would have said that a ‘furious’ or two alongside a good deal of ‘finding the perpetrator’ and locking them up for a long time would have made a better statement.

Currently the criminal young woman remains at large. It seems she attacked the portrait of Balfour because of the Balfour Declaration (one of the founding international documents establishing the right of the State of Israel to be created). So by my count you can now destroy works of art because of the planet, ‘racial justice’ or posthumous linkage to a war in the Middle East. Somebody online who claims to be the perpetrator has written a post saying that she attacked the painting because she couldn’t attend that Saturday’s anti-Israel march ‘for health reasons’. She went on: ‘There’s a lot of boring discussion about the destruction of “art” in the name of protest at the moment.’ It’s sad she’s so easily bored. Then again, two-year-olds often are. The self-proclaimed vandal seems to think that the only works of art that are of merit are works created by working-class people, such as ‘sympathisers of Chartism’. The work of De Laszlo is described by her as having ‘no artistic merit or significance’ as well as being ‘absurd and pompous’.

De Laszlo was, of course, a Hungarian Jew born into poverty. He became a master painter – a creator of exceptional talent. But our era worships other Gods, and it allows the vandals rather than the creators to run uncriticised and unchecked. At some point the vandals will move on to more human subjects – at which point more people will see that a ‘no’ would have been useful an awful lot earlier.