Meet public school prankster who turned the tables on Just Stop Oil

Meet Archie Manners, the posh public school prankster and friend of Prince Harry who turned the tables on Just Stop Oil, as he explains why he simply HAD to target the ‘eco-clowns’

• Archie is one of Tatler’s top ‘power networkers’ and 25th in line to a Dukedom
• YouTuber duped anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn by posing as AstraZeneca stakeholder

Archie Manners doesn’t think the Just Stop Oil protesters are a particularly bad bunch. In fact, he says, he probably went to school with many of ‘the clowns’.

‘They’re all called things like Miffy, Tiffy, Iffy, aren’t they?’ says Archie who attended the £48,000-a-year Radley College with his middle brother Orlando while his youngest brother Humphrey, ‘who’s the one with the brains and the charm’, went to Sherborne.

‘Many of them don’t seem to work. They tend to be under 25 and over 70 as far as I can tell, so people who have got time to take a week off to disrupt other people’s lives.

‘They meet at Pret, which is the most middle-class bougie kind of place, to sup on Peruvian coffee that’s been flown in with a plastic lid. Then they go and do a bit of protesting, disrupt some people. They pop in for another coffee break, do a bit more protesting then go for a nice long sit-down lunch — it’s like a wedding — pop out again to go and throw soup and milk or block the roads. Stop pregnant women getting to the hospital. Stop mothers on the school run and people going about their work.

‘Obviously, climate change is real and needs urgent solutions, but they’re not achieving anything. They’re just p***ing people off.’

Archie is a magician, a mate of Prince Harry’s, one of Tatler’s top ‘power networkers’ and 25th in line to the Dukedom of Rutland

Which is why professional YouTube prankster Archie, 30, and his business partner Josh Pieters, 29, delighted just about anyone who has found their day disrupted by these protesters, when they donned orange T-shirts, with the slogan, ‘Just Stop P***ing Everyone Off’, to turn the tables on the eco-activists. This month, after infiltrating Just Stop Oil with a ‘mole’, the stunt duo, who are known online as Josh and Archie, employed 15 actors to prevent the activists from blocking traffic in South London by surrounding them with a human chain.

Last week they disrupted Just Stop Oil’s 100 per cent plant-based ‘Beyond F***ed Banquet’ in East London when they set off deafening 150-decibel personal rape alarms suspended in helium balloons. The prank, posted on YouTube, has gone viral with more than seven million views across multiple social media platforms.

‘It turns out the alarms were a lot louder than the harpist and caused what Just Stop Oil would call ‘non-violent disruption to prove a point’,’ says Archie.

He confesses he owes the success of many of his pranks to his accent and upbringing and ‘gets away with stuff by using a few long words and sounding like a t**t. Being posh is quite helpful. People don’t think they’re going to be blagged by someone like me’.

Archie is also a magician, a mate of Prince Harry’s, one of Tatler’s top ‘power networkers’ and 25th in line to the Dukedom of Rutland.

He is also the sort of son who keeps his mum awake at night worrying about him. So much so, he tells me, he’s pretty sure his ‘traditionally posh’ father Robert, grandson of Francis Henry Manners, 4th Baron Manners, and his delightfully dotty mum, Samantha, who likes to ‘sing Rhinestone Cowboy on the karaoke machine at three in the morning’, often think, ‘Where the hell has he come from? Was he swapped at birth?’

Archie, 30, and his business partner Josh Pieters, 29, delighted just about anyone who has found their day disrupted by these protesters, when they donned orange T-shirts, with the slogan, ‘Just Stop P***ing Everyone Off’

‘When you turn around after having had the luck of an amazing education and you say to your mum and dad, ‘Thanks so much for all that, but I want to be a professional magician and a YouTuber with no pension, no back-up plan, no nothing,’ there is a part of them that goes, ‘Oh Christ.’

‘But I think you’ve got to follow what you love. So many of my dad’s friends are miserable, fat, balding men in their 50s who are cheating on their wives and about to get divorced because they spent all their time slogging away in the City having a miserable life. It’s not for me.’

Indeed. Archie and Josh, who have worked together for five years, decided to target Just Stop Oil after one of the ‘clowns’ brought a World Championship snooker match to a standstill at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, by jumping on the table and covering it in orange powder. ‘Why snooker?’ he says. ‘I don’t know the last time snooker caused an environmental problem. As far as I can tell, it’s a lot of people gently tapping balls around on green baize.

‘It’s not as if anyone from the United Nations is there. Who’s at a snooker championship who is either responsible for climate change or can do much about it? There’s no royal box with Rishi Sunak sitting in it.

‘People had saved up a lot of money in a cost-of-living crisis to go to the Crucible and they threw orange stuff over the table which put that table out of action for the rest of the day. I’ve no interest in snooker but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I like the people. I think they’re well-meaning but their tactics aren’t working. They’ve been doing this disruptive action for 18 months and nothing has changed.’

Archie and Josh began tossing around ideas in their Goon Squad Productions office in Central London where they also create publicity stunts for brands. Last month, Archie stood outside the High Court during Prince Harry’s phone-hacking case. He was there to promote a sustainable sparkling water company launching a lime-flavoured drink.

He and Josh came up with the ruse of publicising the brand on a sandwich board with the words: ‘Harry doesn’t want the limelight but we do’. The stunt made it onto the BBC News and generated five million views on TikTok.

‘Prince Harry saw me and sent a text saying, ‘What the hell are you doing outside my court case?’ ‘ says Archie. ‘I said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s nothing bad.’ Prince Harry and I are in contact. I did my magic at his 30th birthday party, which was mad, and he seems to keep in touch with what I do.’

Archie tells me there are three basic principles for the perfect prank: it must be funny, justified and, ideally, ‘a non-preachy test’. He comes up with more than 500 ideas a day. Josh is the ‘very sensible’ one who ‘knows exactly which one is the one to do when I get all animated, excited and run away . . .

‘When we were thinking of how we could stop Just Stop Oil, I wondered if maybe we could rope them in somewhere, but we realised they could hop over rope. They can jump, skip and hop, these people — most of them anyway. So we thought we’d just use our bodies, because that’s what they do to the traffic. Then it was about finding the angle of what our slogan was going to be.

Archie is a wondrously funny man. He happily admits to being a ‘complete show off’ which he believes is in the genes he’s inherited from his mother 

‘We didn’t want to say climate change doesn’t exist. We’re not saying that. We’re not saying, ‘Everything is tickety-boo, use more oil’. We know it’s not. We just wanted to say they’re not achieving anything and they’re just p***ing everyone off. The slogan was perfect. So we got 15 actors and held hands. It was like skipping through a playground. They sat down on the floor and dealt with it beautifully.

‘Then we discovered they were having this huge banquet because that’s what you do to save the environment. They were having it at a heritage centre in Bow, East London, where the ceilings were 42 ft high. We thought we’d give them a taste of their own medicine.’

‘Each one of the alarms in the helium balloon was 150 decibels. It made a hell of a racket. They took it in really good spirits and got them down quite quickly.’

Archie is a wondrously funny man. He happily admits to being a ‘complete show off’ which he believes is in the genes he’s inherited from his mother whom he loves dearly and speaks to ‘four to five’ times a day.

She phones him for a sixth time while we are talking in a South London hotel room. She worries less about him being destitute since the Just Stop P***ing Everyone Off video has gone viral, but wants him to set up a pension.

‘YouTube is hit and miss,’ he says. ‘We’ve had an exciting week this week because we’ve put up something people love and had a lot of shares but there’s a lot of stuff we do that misses so some months aren’t so great. My problem is when the money comes in I’m extremely talented at spending it.’

Archie tells me he worries non-stop about money and when the ‘next pay cheque’ is going to come in. His brothers work in the City and are ‘very different’ to him. They’re taller, broader and better at sport, he says, while Archie was pretty useless at everything when he was packed off aged eight to attend Prince William and Harry’s old prep school Ludgrove, which, he describes as ‘very old school’.

‘I was the abnormal one. Rubbish at sport in the kind of school where if you’re good at sport you’re king. I was good at the video unit, which was, essentially, social suicide — and magic,’ he says.Archie set up his first magician’s website at the age of 11 with business cards and a price list. ‘£25 for a good show, £20 for a medium show and £15 for a bad show,’ he laughs, but is being completely truthful. Andrew Lloyd Webber attended one of his early gigs and his client list grew by word of mouth after that.

He has entertained most of the Royal Family and ‘every single prime minister until Boris. I get to meet really interesting people but can’t actually talk about them because I have to sign non-disclosure agreements’. You sense, though, he’s bursting to. He briefly flirted with the idea of a career in politics. ‘They say politics is showbusiness for ugly people. I think I took that quite literally until I realised that ugly people can just carry on in showbusiness without the politics,’ he says.

In his early 20s he began his own YouTube channel Archie Asks. ‘I’d go to random events and interview the public with fake news,’ he says. ‘So I’d stand outside Wimbledon and I’d say, ‘I’m from the BBC, Rafael Nadal is playing Jacob Rees-Mogg in the next round, who do you think is going to win?’ And, you’d get these women going, ‘Well, I think Rees-Mogg is having a very good game,’ chatting complete rubbish. Josh, who was a YouTuber, saw one of these and asked me to work for him.’

The pair hit it off and within a few months they were business partners. An early ‘sting’ a year before Covid involved inventing a fake restaurant, Italian Stallion, which they marketed through Deliveroo. ‘We bought a load of Waitrose ready meals. We stuck them in the microwave and advertised them as luxury Italian meals from a five-star restaurant that didn’t exist.

Last week they disrupted Just Stop Oil’s 100 per cent plant-based ‘Beyond F***ed Banquet’ in East London when they set off deafening 150-decibel personal rape alarms suspended in helium balloons

‘We wanted to prove that Deliveroo don’t check who’s on their platform. It was kind of like a catfish for restaurants.’

And it worked. In each meal delivery, the crew included a note and the customer’s cash back in an envelope, before closing the restaurant on the app.

Archie and Josh’s followers rose from several hundred to several hundreds of thousands with similar stings on companies such as Airbnb, when they photographed a massive doll’s house and advertised it on the site as a real house.

‘Airbnb accepted the listing and we got about £7,000 worth of booking. We obviously gave the money back, but no one guessed it was a doll’s house. It looked like a stately home and Airbnb didn’t check.’

But his favourite prank was when they duped anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn, posing as stakeholders from AstraZeneca. ‘Pfizer and AstraZeneca were kind of competing to be the No 1 vaccine. We offered him £10,000 if he would focus his efforts much more on Pfizer. He was an absolute weirdo. He took the ten grand but I used my magic skills to swap out the cash for £10,000 worth of Monopoly money. So he went home with that.’

Corbyn has since claimed the video, which went viral, was ‘heavily edited’ with ‘dishonest commentary’. Archie shakes his head. ‘He’s also said Covid doesn’t exist and 5G is killing our children. He hasn’t sued us. He wouldn’t have the grounds to. One of our biggest expenses is our lawyers. That’s the rules by which you play the game. This is entertainment. We’re not the mob.’

And suddenly you understand this supercharged, hilarious prankster. Yes, he may be ‘different’ but it’s a kind, funny sort of different which has a place in our social media-driven world and will, I suspect, be far more lucrative for Archie than many of those ‘miserable’ City jobs he eschews. So much so, his delightful mum —who has called numerous times when he turns his phone back on — can sleep easy at night.

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