The group has campaigned on everything from the PPE scandal to the deaths of children in Gaza with their headline-grabbing guerrilla actions. And they’re only just getting started
Maybe you’ve heard the story of how Ben Stewart, James Sadri, Oliver Knowles and Will Rose became Led By Donkeys. They’d met through working at Greenpeace and become friends, and were having a drink in a north London pub at the end of 2018. For two years, Brexit had dominated every news cycle. “We were just completely flummoxed by the chaos the country had been pitched into,” Ben remembers, talking from the Donkeys HQ in Hackney.
The four were laughing at David Cameron’s 2015 election tweet: “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband”. It would be a shame if he deleted it, they agreed. “We said, ‘Let’s put it up on a billboard,’” Stewart continues. “We just found somebody to print it, did it with wallpaper paste – David Cameron wrapped round Ollie’s head, that kind of thing.” It was papered over almost immediately, as were their next four guerrilla billboards, but they survived on social media.
