That soup has missed the oil companies and splattered art lovers

"There is a price to teaching public venues to be suspicious of visitors and it is a price we all pay," wrote Stephen Daisley in response to Just Stop Oil's stunts at Stonehenge and the National Gallery. 

How right he was.

The London blogger Diamond Geezer has written about what a visit to the National Gallery now entails:

Walk-through metal detectors have been a fixture here for years, ditto a perfunctory bag check. This did tend to create queues but nothing ridiculous, and last time I visited back in May I was inside within five minutes. How much worse could it get with liquids banned?Spoilers - really very bad indeed.

And here are just some of the details:

Climbing the steps would normally have been a simple matter but in this case it took 20 minutes to get from the bottom to the top. The pre-booked queue alongside was moving faster but not significantly faster, which must've been frustrating. 

Only when you reached the top was there a sign pointing out what couldn't be taken inside - knives, aerosols and fireworks, obviously, but also now liquids, placards and cut flowers. Four bins had been provided for chucking away undesirable objects and for pouring away that nice drink you didn't realise you shouldn't have been carrying. 

By the time I was finally allowed into the building I had been waiting FIFTY-FIVE minutes, which was ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was that the queue then split into ← Bags and No bags →, each with its own detector arch, and because I didn't have a bag I didn't actually need to have waited all that time for a bag search anyway.

From my observations the pre-booked queue moved about twice as fast as the unbooked one but was also 50 per cent longer, i.e. anyone waiting in that queue would have taken about 40-45 minutes to enter the building. That's also a miserable amount of time to be waiting, especially for those who've done as asked and pre-booked a slot. 

The National Gallery essentially isn't walk-up any more, it's a queueing marathon, and all because visitors can't be trusted not to sneak soup in and chuck it over an Old Master.

Throwing soup - which is wanky and middle-class protest to begin with, like throwing milkshakes at Nigel Farage - has left the oil companies completely unscathed. Its victims have turned out to be art lovers and the reputation of environmental protestors more generally.