Is Ed Miliband Brown’s minister for direct action?

Who would have thought that Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband was quite such a subversive figure? Most of the time he and his brother David, the Foreign Secretary, seem like two peas shelled from the same ambitious pod, but if Monday's events are anything to go by, Miliband Minor has no real designs on further power at all - unless it's at the head of a rampaging mob of anarchists and environmentalists.

Of course, I have only the slenderest of evidence to substantiate this claim; however, in my experience, just as in the realm of the emotions consecutive events are always interpreted causally - you made me feel bad - so in the political sphere post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this") is axiomatic.

Sometime over the weekend Miliband got it into his head to tell a scrivener from the Guardian that "a popular mobilisation" was needed to nudge politicians in the direction of a further treaty on tackling climate change. Like the leader of any post-Marxist cell, Presumin' Ed (as we must now call him, after the crusty dope dealer in Withnail and I), described this mass of concerned individuals as "countervailing forces".

Then, at around three o'clock on Monday morning, a substantial contingent of "countervailing forces" - to whit, members of the anti-aviation environmentalist group, Plane Stupid - cut through the perimeter of Stansted Airport and, using sections of fencing and concrete blocks, erected a stockade within a hundred yards of the runway and imprisoned themselves within it.

Should environmentalists be forming armed terror cells like the ANC?

It took counter-countervailing forces - the police - some hours to release the protesters from the prison of their own making and for the airborne carbon-spreaders to resume dusting the fields of northern Essex. Was this - we have to ask ourselves - what the Environment Secretary had in mind?

After all, he also stated quite clearly that "big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation". So which is it, Presumin' Ed? Should environmentalists be throwing themselves in front of the Grand National and getting force-fed in Pentonville, or perhaps forming armed terrorist cells like the ANC, or simply organising consciousness-raising groups? Which of these is the way forward? In a nutshell: does the minister think the path