The biggest rebel in my year at school (a pretty raggedy state comprehensive near Chester) was a guy called Paul. He had very long hair, wore a trench coat and was regularly told to ‘have a bath’ by the more boorish elements of the playground. Paul railed against the system in the way that only teenagers who have experienced nothing of life but have read at least half of The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider can. The more militaristic tranche of our teachers also hated him for the permanent odour of weed that followed him around and the crude drawing of Che Guevara on his rucksack. He was one of my best friends.

Paul cut his hair and stopped reading Noam Chomsky in his mid-twenties. But he retained his beliefs, quietly obtaining employment in the civil service, working in the field of marine life protection. To me, his journey is a textbook example of how teenage heterodoxy can evolve into something meaningful at a pretty young age. 

I hold no such hopes of maturation when it comes to Arthur Clifton, the figurehead of the nauseating Take Back Power group. Last week, the group of ‘protestors’ announced that after dumping manure inside the Ritz Hotel and throwing custard at a case containing the........

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