We criminalise the political stunt at our peril. It is a crucial art form that is impossible to ignore | Mark Borkowski

We must ask ourselves: how would the heroic suffragettes or the remarkable Greenham Common women be regarded if active today? The answer is simple: they would be locked up. Just as they were locked up then. A century ago, women chained themselves to railings, set fires, endured prison and changed the world, and we celebrate their victories without thinking too hard about their methods. Yet today’s laws would criminalise them on sight.

Last month, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, wore a commemorative sash celebrating the suffragette struggle. Yet this is the same Yvette Cooper presiding over an age of repressive laws and mass arrests. It’s a paradox: we laud the rebels of the past while shackling the rebels of the present.

I have been retracing these acts of protest for a new BBC Radio 4 documentary, Outrage Inc. I wanted to understand not just the anger, but the creative genius and conviction behind the stunt. Because at its best, a stunt isn’t chaos. It’s an art form – theatre with consequences. It’s designed to provoke, timed to perfection and impossible to ignore. Those who stage them aren’t amateurs: they storyboard, construct narrative, marshal resources. They are producers of disruption.

Take the suffragettes. With their matchsticks, they weren’t vandals – they were master tacticians who understood the media economy of Edwardian Britain. By the early 1900s, papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express were locked in a circulation war, selling millions of copies at a penny each. Their lifeblood was advertising and their oxygen was spectacle. Respectful reports of speeches and petitions did not move papers off newsstands. Outrage did.

Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union knew this. They didn’t smash Bond Street windows or torch postboxes for fun. They did it because they knew the placards outside kiosks would scream “SUFFRAGETTE OUTRAGE”, forcing the issue into every parlour in Britain. Editors vilified them, yes, but they printed the stories, because sensation sold. That was the economy, and the suffragettes exploited it ruthlessly. In today’s parlance, they hacked the algorithm.

The Greenham women weren’t eccentrics, either. They were moral Boudiccas who turned protest into performance art on a national scale. Tents, banners, singing at the wire, cutting fences, dancing on missile silos looked anarchic, but it was a rolling installation, a piece of theatre that lasted nearly a decade. Some of it was planned, some improvised, but its genius lay in persistence. They kept the story alive, constantly reframing it so the cameras always had something to see and the public always had something to talk about.

And then there’s Peter Tatchell. He didn’t simply “make a scene”, he made himself the scene. He has spent decades putting his own body on the line: attempting a citizen’s arrest of Robert Mugabe, confronting police indifference to homophobic violence, interrupting Easter sermons. He has been beaten unconscious, arrested countless times, vilified and celebrated. Tatchell embodies conviction, turning his own suffering into testimony, forcing Britain to confront prejudice it preferred to ignore.

Fast-forward to 2004 and the Yes Men’s audacious Bhopal stunt. They posed as Dow Chemical executives on BBC World, announcing a $12bn compensation package for victims of the disaster. For a brief moment, the world believed justice had arrived. Dow’s share price plummeted before the hoax was exposed. This wasn’t chaos, it was conviction armed with wit, a mind bomb detonated live on air.

Or take Germany’s Centre for Political Beauty, which built a replica Holocaust memorial outside the home of the Alternative für Deutschland leader, Björn Höcke. The far right had claimed the “wounds of the Holocaust should heal”. Its answer was unignorable concrete, a daily reminder that history isn’t a wound to be closed for convenience. It was satire sharpened into steel, cutting deeper than any speech.

And then there’s Led By Donkeys, the post-Brexit guerrillas. They don’t rant. They don’t editorialise. They hold up a mirror, reminding politicians of words they have said, written or tweeted, and probably wished they hadn’t. Their giant projection on parliament, Boris Johnson’s lies replayed on the cliffs of Dover, their Covid memorial wall of thousands of painted hearts; these weren’t stunts for novelty’s sake. They weaponised the words of the powerful, replaying them until they choked their authors. Clarity, timing, simplicity.

This is the lesson we keep forgetting. Protest isn’t just confrontation, it’s an imagination weaponised. A stunt is a mind bomb that plants itself in the national conversation. These acts of theatre marry humour and symbolism to conviction, creating ripples that travel long after the news cameras have moved on.

Yet the cycle is always the same. At the time, protests are demonised, particularly by the right, who instinctively oppose change. Later, the very same acts are reappraised, rehabilitated or even lauded. The suffragettes, once branded terrorists, are now national heroines. The Greenham women, once derided as cranks in cardigans, are now honoured for their foresight. Time transforms outrage into heritage.

Today, with Palestine Action banned and Extinction Rebellion dismissed as a nuisance, we’re told that only “lawful protest” is legitimate. But the suffragettes would fail that test, and so would Greenham. Their legacies endure because they didn’t seek permission, they sought change. Their power lay in creativity, conviction and the audacity to place truth before power and performance before permission.

Having examined the BBC archives for Outrage Inc, I believe we are at a crossroads. We can allow protest to be neutered into stage-managed civility, or we can acknowledge that it has always been outrageous, risky and profoundly creative. This is not a rallying cry for lawlessness. But we should reflect on the red-hot battles that forged our society. We call them stunts, but the word feels too trivial for acts that pushed the envelope and forced us to confront inequality and injustice.

Because history shows this: the stunt is never a sideshow. It is the main act of change.

• Mark Borkowski is a crisis PR consultant and author. His BBC Radio 4 Archive on 4 documentary, Outrage Inc, airs on 23 August