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 into law lies outside the law?

Probably not, because in the same interview Presumin' Ed went on to reminisce about other great "popular mobilisations" of our era: "I think back to Make Poverty History," he said, "and that was a mass movement that was necessary to get the agreement". Oh yes indeed - and what a success that's turned out to be; I mean to say, Sir Bob held Blair and Bush to severe account at Gleneagles in 2005, thousands of teenagers and kidults bought wristbands and listened to self-righteous pop acts, and now poverty is definitely history. Isn't it?

No, I hate to consider such a prosaic answer to this conundrum - especially when political reality is so twisted - but my suspicion is that Miliband's statements and the eco-warriors' raid on Stansted Airport were merely coincidence. I know, I know - this sounds as implausible as those climate-change deniers who say that the rise in the earth's temperature in conjunction with the industrial revolution is also a "mere coincidence", and point to the fact that icy ages and hot ones fluctuate with one another over millennia-long time spans.

Of course, that's why the environment is such an attractive portfolio for the likes of Presumin' Ed; after all, while a week may be a long time in politics, it's less that no time at all in the lifetime of Mother Earth. Politicians can spout all kinds of guff on the environment - or so they hope - without being called to account at the next election, or even - gulp! - the one after that. Yes, it my take a lustrum or five before we discover whether the minister was being plane - or merely plain - stupid. ·