The climate action group Just Stop Oil has announced it is to disband at the end of April. Its activists have been derided as attention-seeking zealots and vandals and it is loathed by many for its disruptive direct action tactics. It says it has won because its demand that there should be no new oil and gas licences is now government policy. So, did they really win and does this mark an end to the chaos caused by its climate protests?

Hayley Walsh’s heart was racing as she sat in the audience at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 27 January this year. The 42 year-old lecturer and mother of three tried to calm her breathing. Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver was onstage in her West End debut production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But Hayley, a Just Stop Oil activist, had her own drama planned.

As Weaver’s Prospero declaimed “Come forth, I say,” Hayley sprang from her seat and rushed the stage with Richard Weir, a 60-year-old mechanical engineer from Tyneside. They launched a confetti cannon and unfurled a banner that read “Over 1.5 Degrees is a Global Shipwreck” – a reference to the news that 2024 was the first year to pass the symbolic 1.5C threshold in global average temperature rise, and a nod to the shipwreck theme in the play.

It was a classic Just Stop Oil (JSO) action. The target was high profile and would guarantee publicity. The message was simple and presented in the group’s signature fluorescent orange.

The reaction of those affected was also a classic response to JSO. Amid the boos and whistles you can hear a shout of “idiots”.

“Drag them off the stage”, one audience member can be heard shouting, “I hope you [expletive] get arrested,” another says.

JSO is a UK-based environmental activist group that aims to end fossil fuel extraction and uses direct action to draw attention to its cause. It has been called a “criminal cult” and its activists branded “eco-loons” by the Sun. The Daily Mail has described it as “deranged” and says its members have “unleashed misery on thousands of ordinary people though their selfish antics”.

The group has thrown soup at a Van Gogh in the National Gallery, exploded a chalk dust bomb during the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield, smashed a cabinet containing a copy of the Magna Carta at the British Library, sprayed temporary paint on the stones of Stonehenge and even defaced Charles Darwin’s grave.

But it is the group’s road protests that have probably caused the most disruption – and public anger. In November 2022, 45 JSO members climbed gantries around the M25 severely disrupting traffic for over four days. People missed flights, medical appointments and exams as thousands of drivers were delayed for hours. The cost to the Metropolitan Police was put at £1.1 million.

Just Stop Oil was born out of Extinction Rebellion (XR). XR – founded in 2018 – brought thousands of people onto the streets in what were dubbed “festivals of resistance”. They came to a peak in April 2019, when protestors brought parts of the capital to a halt for more than a week and plonked a large pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus.

The spectacle and disruption XR caused generated massive media attention, but the police were furious. Hundreds of officers were diverted from frontline duties and by the end of 2019 the bill for policing the protests had reached £37m.

And behind the scenes XR was riven by furious debates about tactics. Many inside the movement said it should be less confrontational and disruptive but a hard core of activists argued it would be more effective to double down on direct action.

It became clear that there was room for what Sarah Lunnon, one of the co-founders of Just Stop Oil, calls “a more radical flank”. They decided a new, more focused operation was needed, modelled on earlier civil disobedience movements like the Suffragettes, Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns and the civil rights movement in the US.

The group was formally launched on Valentine’s Day, 2022. It was a very different animal to XR. Instead of thousands of people taking part in street carnivals, JSO’s actions involved a few committed activists. A small strategy group oversaw the campaign and meticulously planned its activities. A mobilisation team worked to recruit new members, and another team focused on supporting activists after they were arrested.

The dozens of actions the group has carried out generated lots of publicity, but also massive public opposition. There were confrontations between members of the public and protestors and an outcry from politicians across all the main political parties.

The police said they needed more powers to deal with this new form of protest and they got them. New offences were created including interfering with national infrastructure, “locking on” – chaining or gluing yourself to something – and tunnelling underground. Causing a public nuisance also became a potential crime – providing the police with a powerful new tool to use against protestors who block roads.

In the four years since it was formed dozens of the group’s supporters have been jailed. Five activists were handed multi-year sentences for their role in the M25 actions in 2022. Those were reduced on appeal earlier this month but are still the longest jail terms for non-violent civil disobedience ever issued.

Senior JSO members deny the crackdown had anything to do with the group’s decision to “hang up the hi-vis” – as its statement this week announcing the end of campaign put it.

JSO’s public position is that it has won its battle. “Just Stop Oil’s initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history,” the group claimed.

The government has said it does not plan to issue any new licences for oil and gas production but strongly denies its policies have a link to JSO. Furthermore, the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson told journalists: “We have been very clear when it comes to oil and gas that it has a future for decades to come in our energy mix.”

And the group’s wider goal – to end the production of oil and gas – has manifestly not been achieved. The members of the group I spoke to for this article all agree the climate crisis has deepened.

In the face of stiffer sentences, some climate campaigners have said they will turn to more clandestine activities. One new group says it plans a campaign of sabotage against key infrastructure. In a manifesto published online it says it plans to “kickstart a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors of the fossil fuel economy.”

That’s not a direction the JSO members I spoke to said they wanted to go. Sarah Lunnon said a key principle of JSO and the civil disobedience movement generally was that activists would take responsibility for their actions. One of the first questions new joiners were asked is whether they would be willing to be locked up.

“As corporations and billionaires corrupt political systems across the world, we need a different approach.

“We are creating a new strategy, to face this reality and to carry our responsibilities at this time,” the group says, suggesting they may be planning to form a new movement.

JSO’s most high-profile figure, Roger Hallam, is one of the five activists convicted for their role in the M25 protests. In a message from his prison cell he acknowledged that JSO has only had a “marginal impact”.

That is “not due to lack of trying,” he said. The failure lay with the UK’s “elites and our leaders” who had walked away from their responsibility to tackle the climate crisis, Hallam claimed. A hint perhaps that the group’s new focus might be on the political system itself.

JSO has said its last protest – to be held at the end of April – will mark “the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets”. But don’t believe it. When pressed, the JSO members I spoke to said they may well turn back to disruptive tactics but under a new name and with a new and as yet unspecified objective.