Victims of infected blood are dying “two a week” while awaiting compensation for the biggest scandal in the history of the NHS, campaigners say.

More than 30,000 people in the UK were given treatments infected with HIV and Hepatitis C between the late 1970s and early 1990s, resulting in more than 3,000 deaths.

Tony Summers, 89, whose son died after being given infected blood products, said he was told he may not receive compensation until 2029 and fears he might be dead before then.

A Labour MP described the delay as “embarrassing”, while the Infected Blood Compensation Authority (IBCA) said its priority was to pay compensation to “as many people as soon as possible”.

In May 2024, a public inquiry found the authorities had covered up the scale of what is now known as the infected blood scandal.

In response, the UK government set aside £11.8bn to compensate the victims – including parents, children and siblings – of which there could be as many as 140,000.

But many victims, charities and the inquiry’s chair, Sir Brian Langstaff, have expressed concern about the way compensation is being implemented and the time it is taking.

Forty people have accepted offers of compensation, and 18 people – less than 1% of those eligible – have received compensation so far, according to the IBCA.

Mr Summers’ son Paul was diagnosed with HIV and Hepatitis C after being given a blood clotting product used to treat haemophilia.

He died in 2008 at the age of 44.

“I just feel so proud of what [Paul] achieved, because he had so much to offer,” said Mr Summers, from Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan.

“I would like to feel that everything we started in 1984, which has been a long journey, we won’t have lost it.

“We will have achieved and that will give me more satisfaction than anything. Just to feel that we did the right thing.

“It’s probably the most important thing in my life to get to the end of this, to get closure. I just want this to be over.”

Mr Summers claims to have been told he may not receive compensation until 2029 – five years after the inquiry’s final report was published.

“By then I’ll be 93, you begin to have doubts,” he said.

“People are still dying from any affected illnesses. Parents are dying. So it feels as though there’s a policy [of] ‘if we hang on long enough we won’t have to pay that money’.”

Lynne Kelly, chair of Haemophilia Wales, said people wanted closure after campaigning for more than four decades.

“People are dying two a week at the moment, so we’re in a really difficult position,” she said.

“They’re delaying and delaying because more and more people are dying.

“The infected are dying, and when the affected die their claim dies with them so there’s no claim to be made and bit by bit, less and less people will be eligible for compensation and less money will be paid.

“They’ve been ignored for 40 years, they’ve campaigned for 40 years. We feel history is repeating itself. It’s heart-breaking.”

The IBCA is administering payments, which are exempt from tax and will not affect benefits.

A person infected with HIV could expect to get compensation of between £2.2m and £2.6m.

Those with a chronic hepatitis C infection, defined as lasting more than six months, could expect to receive between £665,000 and £810,000.

The partner of someone infected with HIV who is still alive today could expect to receive about £110,000.

Around 4,000 survivors or their bereaved families have also received interim payments worth up to £310,000 since 2022.

Labour MP Clive Efford, the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Haemophilia and Contaminated Blood, said the situation had become “an embarrassing issue for the government”.

“We owe it to these people to get this compensation out the door as quickly as possible because they’ve been suffering as a consequence of this for many, many years, they’ve been forced to take on the state.”

David Foley, Interim Chief Executive of the IBCA, said its priority was to pay “as many people as soon as possible as we design and build a compensation claim service”.

Mr Foley said the IBCA had now contacted more than 250 people but he said they were “acutely aware there are many more awaiting compensation”.

“We will continue to increase the number of compensation payments made as we build the claims service further,” he added.

“We are committed to making payments to the majority of infected people by 2027 and the majority of affected people by 2029 – making these payments faster than this wherever possible.”

It was the last thing I was expecting as I sat in my office late one evening.

I had been using some new facial recognition software, seeing how well it worked.

I put a photo of Craig Arch – the CEO of Cask Whisky Ltd, the multi-million-pound international award-wining cask whisky business – into the software.

I wasn’t expecting to get much but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There, in front of me, was a police mugshot.

The articles linked to the image told of a £6.2m fraud with hundreds of victims.

And the man behind it was the one staring back at me.

I have spent years investigating serious criminals. From human traffickers and gunrunners to contract killers and cocaine smugglers. One thing I never thought I’d end up investigating was whisky.

BBC Producer Liam McDougall told me of a source he had – a whistleblower – who said that organised crime had infiltrated the whisky industry, that he had compiled a hitlist of suspect whisky investment companies, and would we be interested in looking into it?

One of those on the list was a company called Cask Whisky Ltd.

It was set up in 2021 and, in its first year of trading, it reported a multi-million-pound turnover.

It boasted of operations in Hong Kong, and it was winning awards.

The CEO was a man called Craig Arch.

In interviews, he spoke of opening brand new headquarters and doubling their staff in the first twelve months.

He also told of their ambitions for the future, and said he was “excited for what the next few years will bring”.

It was only when I put his photo into the face recognition software, that I discovered the shocking truth behind the man.

His real name is Craig Brooks. He was jailed in 2019 for his part in a £6.2m investment scam. The 350 victims were mainly elderly.

He had come out of prison, changed his appearance, changed his name to Arch, and set up Cask Whisky Ltd.

Disqualified from being a director, he put his fiancé – an eyebrow technician from Essex – down on the paperwork as the boss.

I spoke to investors who had handed over tens of thousands to Craig Arch and his gang, believing they were buying the best of whisky, in casks, which would give them returns of 13% or more.

Yet the investors discovered that many of the casks they had bought, had either been heavily overpriced – up to five times in some cases – or didn’t exist at all.

Little did they know that they had, in fact, been handing over their money to a convicted fraudster.

A man disqualified from being a director. A man who was lying as to who he was.

I wanted to catch Craig Brooks in the act, but no sooner had I started looking into Cask Whisky Ltd, than the company disappeared.

It was under investigation by the City of London Police for alleged fraud.

I had missed my chance.

And yet, it seemed, no-one knew that Craig Arch wasn’t Craig Arch. That he was really Craig Brooks, a convicted fraudster.

My chance to expose this came when I noticed a new whisky company coming to the fore – Cask Spirits Global.

Immediately the red flags went up.

The branding looked similar. The social media images I’d seen before.

When I checked the history of the company name on Facebook, it was there in black and white. It was Cask Whisky Ltd.

Had Brooks simply set up yet another company? Was he already back on the hunt for potential investors?

Seeing this as my chance, I sent Cask Spirits Global an email, pretending to be an asset management consultant who was representing a wealthy client keen to invest in whisky.

Within minutes of sending it, I got a reply. From a man called Hutchins. Craig Hutchins. It was too much of a coincidence.

Although I believed this to be Craig Brooks, I had to prove it.

No investor I spoke to had ever met the man in person.

All the financials were done by email.

But with the lure of a potential big-money deal, it wasn’t long before a meeting was arranged.

A few weeks later and I arrived at the Westminster office of Cask Spirits Global.

Walking into the room, I came face-to-face with a man I had come to know well.

I had been looking at his image for months now, had been investigating his tactics which had cost investors millions, and had been tracking his every move.

It was Craig Brooks.

And here he was, now pretending to be the managing director of yet another company. Under yet another name.

Alongside him were two members of his gang, both of whom had worked for Cask Whisky Ltd – the company under investigation by the police.

And both of them were now also using false names.

During the secret meeting, Brooks told me he had 11,000 clients all over Europe, built up over a seven-year whisky career.

“The youngest is 19,” he told me. “The oldest is about 92.”

As for the size of his business, he said: “I’ve got contracts with all the warehouses in Scotland.

“The majority of clients, they start small and so, anywhere between £3,000 and £50,000.

“So, I think my largest trade is £1.4m. We can receive any amount up to £4m without notifying the bank.”

He told me there was no mark-up on the casks they bought for investors, and they only made money down the line from the sale of those casks.

Brooks then proceeded to give me a list of casks for my client to buy – totalling almost £1.5m.

I showed the list to several industry experts, who said they were heavily overpriced – in some cases, up to ten times the real value.

As for the company, he ran it, he said, and all financial decisions were made by him.

“We’re in safe hands?” I asked him.

“Yeah. 100%.” he said.

When I confronted him a few weeks later, he admitted his real name was Brooks, but said all the whisky he had previously sold existed, and that he hadn’t been jailed for fraud, but for unfair business practices.

The two colleagues who were also using false names, said they had simply been using names given to them when they joined the new company.

During my eight-month investigation into the whisky trade, I met so many investors with heart-breaking stories of losing all they had.

And I discovered the callous tactics that criminals were using to take it from them.

If there was one lesson I took away from it, it was this: if you are thinking of investing in cask whisky, do your homework – because not everybody is who they say they are.

Police are investigating three Scotch whisky companies over fraud allegations, with investments running into the millions.

Alex Warren is on top of the world.

Ordinary, a song he wrote for his wife Kouvr after their wedding last year, is at number one in six different countries.

He has two more songs in the UK Top 40, and his UK tour has been upgraded to 5,000-capacity venues, due to insatiable demand.

Backstage at the Hammersmith Apollo, the Californian singer is endearingly, humbly bewildered by the whole thing.

“All of this is happening really quickly,” he says. “I only wrote Ordinary three months ago. I’m honestly blown away.”

But the 24-year-old didn’t arrive out of nowhere.

He’s one of the founders of the Hype House – a collaborative TikTok group who lived and worked together in the Los Angeles hills and shepherded millions of teenagers though the pandemic.

You could easily to dismiss him as yet another social media influencer trying to break into the music industry. It’s an accusation he’s aware of, and prepared for.

“I watched a lot of people, a lot of TikTokkers, make music and there was no meaning behind it. It was just something they decided to do,” he says.

“But I wanted to write about real things. No one else can sing my songs. I don’t take other people’s demos. This is all mine.”

Even a passing glance at his discography proves him right.

Warren’s arena pop anthems are searingly honest, almost to a fault, drawing on his challenging childhood, and fairytale romance with Kouvr.

His father died when he was nine years old, after a long struggle with kidney cancer. The loss sent his mother spiralling into alcoholism, something Warren only realised when he tried to clear up one of her coffee mugs.

“It turned out to be alcohol,” he says. “And the next day it was alcohol, and the next day it was alcohol, and at 4am it was alcohol, and when we were driving, it was alcohol.”

When he called her out on it, the addiction turned to abuse.

“Every person struggling with addiction needs someone to blame it on, besides themselves, and I became that person,” he says.

When he was 18, she kicked him out. He was broke and homeless. Friends let him sleep in their cars – never their houses, because his mum had convinced their parents he was a trouble-maker.

Around the same time, he was introduced to Instagram model Kouvr Annon by a friend on Snapchat.

“We just clicked right away,” he says. “I felt I could tell her everything, just after our first conversation.”

Within four months, Kouvr left her family in Hawaii, flew out to California and started living with Warren in a car.

Then, as now, they’re an exceptionally cute couple – tender and funny and clearly besotted with one another. When they started posting videos of their romance online, people wanted to see more. In a span of six months, Warren gained more than a million followers on YouTube.

Combined with the prank videos he’d filmed with his friends, he built a big enough audience to start earning money.

“When I got my first cheque for $2,000 in a month, I was like, ‘Holy cow, this is gonna change my life’,” he recalls.

Some of that money went into the creation of the Hype House in 2019. Warren came up with the name, and moved into the property with Annon and a bunch of young internet stars like Addison Rae, Charlie D’Amelio, Chase Hudson and Thomas Petrou.

The collective introduced themselves in December 2019 with a photoshoot that mimicked Backstreet Boys video for I Want It That Way.

By the end of the day, the hashtag #hypehouse was trending, and the mansion quickly became an incubator for viral videos.

The enterprise thrived during lockdown but, as individual members signed TV deals, or grew tired of the escalating demands for content, it started to fall apart. Warren and Annon left in 2022, citing a desire to “move on to the next chapter in their lives”.

Since then, rumours have swirled about behind-the-scenes drama at the house, with some members hinting at exploitation and mistreatment.

“There was falling out,” Warren told the Zach Sang show in 2023. “But a lot of us signed NDAs, so no-one’s going to talk about it.”

He did, however, pour his frustrations into music.

“How do you sleep at night?” he sings on the angst-ridden Burning Down, a song allegedly targeted at one of the Hype House’s co-founders.

“It scars forever when someone you called your friend / Shows you the truth can be so cold.”

Warren says he never made money from the Hype House. What it did give him, however, was a built-in audience for his music.

“I think that’s really rare,” he says. “Usually, when someone goes from social media to music, they lose that fan base.

“But I think a lot of people watched my YouTube videos because they were having a rough life and needed an escape. So when I started making music about my rough life, I think they identified with it even more.”

Warren dreamt of a music career long before he entered the Hype House. Back when TikTok was called Music.ally, he’d even created a burner account to share his songs.

“I didn’t want to post on my main account, because I was terrified of failing,” he explains.

“As a kid, people bullied me for singing and doing talent shows and dedicating songs to my fifth grade girlfriend, you know?

“So I posted on a random account I created, and I filmed myself singing on the toilet because I wanted to show I wasn’t taking it seriously.

“And the next day, I woke up and had 10 million views.”

His first release was 2021’s One More I Love You, a song he started when he was 13 years old and coming to terms with his father’s death.

“I watched my sister go to a daddy-daughter dance without her dad, and that’s when I realised, ‘Oh, wait, my life is different’,” he recalls.

“I started mourning for the first time, and I didn’t know how to process it, so I just went to the piano and played some chords. And that’s kind of where I started learning how to write.”

Warren’s outpouring of grief is powerful in its simplicity, but it has touched people in ways he couldn’t have anticipated.

“The other day, a woman wanted me to sign a Heinz Beans t-shirt,” he says. “I giggled because I thought that was funny, then she turned it over, and it was the same t-shirt her son wore right before he died from cancer.

“One More I Love You was the song that she played at that funeral and the song she listened to help her get over it.”

“I think that’s the most powerful thing in the world.”

The musician, who was raised a Catholic, believes that healing moments like those are part of God’s plan for him.

“Without all the loss, all the trauma, all the things in my life, I wouldn’t have these songs. I wouldn’t have the means to help the 5,000 people coming to the show tonight, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my future family with my wife.

“And I think those are all things that are meant to happen, or can happen if I make the right choices.

“You know, I could have chosen to get into drugs and be a bad person but I chose this path.

“It’s the craziest thing.”

For two years, Jeannie Dillard has saved what she can on her fixed income to replace the vehicle that was stolen from her home and found totalled a few miles away.

She looked around a used car dealership in Virginia on Thursday, peering at sticker prices with a newfound worry: blanket tariffs on foreign cars and car parts that experts warn could drive up prices in the US. They kick in next week.

She’d like to buy a car now, she said, but: “I have to wait until my finances improve”.

Ms Dillard is among the plethora of Americans bracing for expected economic turbulence under President Donald Trump’s sweeping auto tariffs – an unprecedented US trade policy maneuver.

“It took me a long time to save up for the last car,” she said. “If prices get too high, I’m obviously not going to buy something that I can’t afford.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

On Wednesday, Trump announced new import taxes of 25% on cars and car parts entering the US from overseas that go into effect on 2 April.

Charges on businesses importing vehicles are expected on 3 April, and taxes on parts are set to start in May or later.

Trump and members of his administration have argued that tariffs will lead to “tremendous growth” and increase jobs in the US.

But experts and automakers have warned in dire terms that tariffs could raise prices for US consumers, amplifying the stress of an already sluggish economy.

Mohamad Husseini, co-owner of a used car dealership in Maryland, said he expects the additional tariff costs to get passed down to the consumer.

“The prices in the wholesale market have skyrocketed already,” he told the BBC.

“It’s going to get worse.”

A car that would sell for $13,000 (£10,000) might rise to $14,500 (£11,200) because of the tariffs, Mr Husseini said. He predicts consumers will see prices increase in the next three to six weeks.

The auto tariffs will likely force car dealers like Mr Husseini to raise prices.

“We all still have bills to pay, mouths to feed and employees to pay,” he said.

At another car dealership, Robin Sloan was hoping to get a deal before prices increased.

She said she probably would have waited until the summer to go car shopping, but “with the tariffs, I decided I should go out and look now”.

She rejected the Trump administration’s claim that tariffs will cause Americans to buy US cars instead of foreign.

“I don’t think I would buy a car made in the United States just because of the tariffs, I think I would probably wait a few years until things settle down,” she explained.

From car buyers to car dealers, the effects of tariffs will be widespread, for better or for worse, experts say.

In the US, there are 908 motor vehicles per 1,000 people. About 92% of households own a vehicle.

Car ownership is typically higher in the US than in Europe, surveys say, partly because in the absence of extensive public transport systems, many Americans do not have a choice in how they get around.

They are also more than just a means of transportation. As symbols of both freedom and success, cars have a unique place in the national identity, from the show Pimp My Ride to Janice Joplin singing “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”.

John Heitmann, a University of Dayton professor and automobile historian who, in his free time, likes to polish his 1982 Mercedes SL, said that tariffs will have an existential, as well as an economic, impact.

“New cars are really out of the reach of a good number of Americans to begin with,” he told the BBC. “Consumers will not benefit, prices will go up,” particularly amongst more affordable vehicles made in Korea, like Hyundais, he said.

As a vintage-car enthusiast, he said tariffs have added a layer of uncertainty to his hobby.

“About 50 minutes ago, I got an email from a part supplier in the UK saying, ‘Don’t worry… they’re not going to go up, probably,'” he said.

“‘We haven’t seen anything in writing yet.’ That’s what they said.”

Higher-end imported vehicles, such as Audis, BMWs and Mercedes, will increase in price, too, Mr Heitmann said, though many of those who buy from such brands might be able to absorb a heftier price tag.

A 2024 study by the US International Trade Commission predicted that a 25% tariff on imports would reduce imports by almost 75%, while increasing average prices in the US by about 5%.

The US imported about eight million cars last year – accounting for about $240bn (£186bn) in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Despite efforts from some car makers – including Ford and General Motors – to discourage Trump from enacting auto tariffs, the president is forging ahead.

Some car makers are embracing Trump’s tariffs, however.

On Tuesday, Hyundai, the South Korean car-marker, announced it would invest $21bn (£16.3bn) in the US by building a new steel plant in Louisiana.

Trump said the move is a “clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work”.

But the tariffs are likely to impact domestic cars as well. US auto manufacturing has been deeply intertwined with industries in Canada and Mexico for decades. Parts criss-cross the borders several times before they are assembled, which means that even a vehicle as iconically American as a Ford pickup truck could see a sticker price increase.

Ultimately, Trump’s tariff strategy will thrust the auto industry into uncharted territory, leaving uncertainty hanging over consumers, dealers and automakers until they go into effect on Wednesday.

“Everything’s topsy turvy now, you know, and it’s also terribly filled with uncertainty, because no one exactly knows what kind of game is really being played by the Trump administration related to all the bluster of these tariffs,” Mr Heitmann said.

Some, like Mya Fountain-Bunch, just want to get through the unease. She took her car into a dealership this week to avoid needing a replacement after the tariffs hit.

“[I’m] making sure that my car is working and hopefully I won’t have to buy another car in the next few years, or at least the next four years until this administration is done with.”

Meiying Wu contributed to this report.

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.

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.

David remembers the moment he found his elderly stepfather, John, unkempt and suffering from dementia, living alone in an unclean hotel room.

“I didn’t think you’d leave an animal in the state that room was in,” he says. ” There was no care at all. You would not leave a vulnerable old man like that.”

Months earlier, John had vanished. His eldest granddaughter, Amy, had taken control of his welfare and his finances, and stopped any contact between John and the rest of his family, including Barbara, his wife of many years.

With Amy’s help, John had changed his will, making her the sole beneficiary, and had then been left to live by himself in a single room, confused and isolated.

John’s family was one of hundreds who contacted the BBC after hearing The Willpower Detectives last year.

The series revealed how a partner at an Essex-based law firm was using what’s known as Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) to take over the finances of vulnerable clients.

In June, Parliament will debate a private member’s bill to provide extra safeguards to LPA. The bill – introduced by the MP Fabian Hamilton – has cross-party support, and is shaped in part by the BBC’s investigations and the huge public response to the cases raised.

The story of John Wilcox demonstrates how, in handing over responsibility for their financial assets, vulnerable people can sometimes be put at risk by members of their own family.

After many years of running a successful office-furnishing business in Leeds, John and Barbara Wilcox had retired and were living comfortably in mid-Wales.

Both had been married before. John had no children of his own, but he loved Barbara’s son and daughter as his own, as well as her three grandchildren. To each of these, he had given enough money to buy their first homes.

However, everything changed in 2020 when John was diagnosed with dementia.

The condition caused a personality change, and John became delusional and paranoid. He started to accuse Barbara and his own brother Desmond of plotting against him.

Following a collapse at home John was taken to hospital, where – because of Covid restrictions – nobody was allowed to visit.

This isolation fed John’s feelings of paranoia, and the suspicion that he had been abandoned by his family.

It was during this time that John’s eldest granddaughter, Amy – the one person he still seemed to trust – began to take charge of his life.

At first, no-one in the family was suspicious. John had always been close to Amy.

Unknown to them, John had requested and signed a form banning contact between anyone involved in his care and anyone in his family, apart from Amy.

Even though his medical notes describe him as paranoid and delusional, John was declared as having “mental capacity” – this was significant because it meant he could legally grant someone lasting power of attorney over his finances.

Barbara says her efforts to raise concerns with social services were blanked: “They just didn’t want to know. They weren’t interested in the letters that we wrote.”

After three months in hospital, John was discharged into Amy’s care. She suggested he could recuperate at a care home at Paignton in Devon, near where she lived, while she readied her house for him to stay there.

At this stage, the other family members thought this was just a temporary arrangement in everyone’s best interests. Amy said that it was what John wanted, and it would be a respite for Barbara.

However, Barbara recalls: “As soon as she got him down there, the vitriol started.” Amy told the rest of the family they no longer had any say about John’s welfare, and they were not to try to contact him.

In response to their pleas, it was agreed that a niece of John’s would call him once a week to check that he was alright.

But six weeks after he was admitted to the care home, the niece made her regular call, only to be told that John had left.

The family was devastated – John had disappeared.

They went to the police but were told he had signed a form in hospital instructing that no information should be shared with them. They were only told that John was not living with Amy.

The family discovered that John had signed an LPA document giving Amy power of attorney over all his property and finances.

Meanwhile, a solicitor in Devon contacted Barbara asking about their home and joint assets. Barbara later found out about John’s new will, which named Amy as the sole beneficiary.

This development had immediate and stressful consequences. The solicitor asked Barbara to begin the process of selling the home she had shared with John, in order to release his share of their assets.

John’s brother, Desmond, took the lead in trying to find out where John now was. It took him several weeks.

He says he rang 50 care homes, trying to track John down. He and Barbara also wrote to Amy asking her to at least tell them how her grandfather was, but they say they never received a reply.

Eventually, Amy’s aunt confronted her in person, and found out that John was in a hotel in Torquay.

Desmond knew that in the past, John had lent £100,000 to a friend who owned several hotels in south-west England.

It appeared that John had been put up at one of these hotels. The owner had made a deal to offset John’s bill (a nightly rate of £265) against his outstanding debt.

Amy’s father, David, drove to the hotel. He was horrified by what he found: “The conditions he was living in were appalling. I was absolutely astounded.”

John was renting the room only – with no cleaning services or food. There was a fridge and a microwave oven – in which he would heat ready meals supplied by Amy.

For David, it was the ultimate betrayal of a vulnerable man. He says that John was dishevelled and confused: “He was just abandoned. He hardly went out of that room and it was in a terrible state.”

Having found John, his family decided they needed to tread carefully. They say they wanted him to understand the truth about what had been done to him, and they were also worried that Amy might try to move him again.

At first, John refused to see Barbara, claiming she had tried to kill him, and that she had never come to see him in hospital.

And then one day, Barbara drove to John’s hotel with her son David and his partner Julie. She stayed outside in the car but gave David a tin of flapjacks to take to John in his room.

The touch and smell of a faded everyday item – an old cake tin with some homemade flapjacks inside – seemed to have an effect on him.

“I know what’s in there,” he said to his stepson.

“Do you know who made them?” David remembers asking John.

John replied: “Yes I do.”

David then offered to bring Barbara into the hotel room and John agreed.

Barbara says she was heartbroken by her husband’s physical and mental deterioration. He weighed only seven-and-a-half stone, and he was so weak that she thinks he would have died if he had been left much longer.

It was a “very, very emotional” reunion, she remembers. Before long, they were holding hands and John had agreed to come home with her.

The next day, Barbara and her brother Mike came back to the hotel to pick John up. Mike says it felt like they were “planning a heist”. He recalls that “as we drove away and started to get out of Torquay, I said: ‘Oh gosh, we got away with that.'”

Back in Wales, Barbara was able to see John’s bank accounts, and discovered that Amy had taken more than £5,000 – there was just 16p left in his account.

But John’s story had a happy ending of sorts. He managed to get the power of attorney and the new will cast aside, and lived for nine months with Barbara in Wales, before dying peacefully at home.

His tale highlights the difficulties involved when it comes to deciding who has control of what’s often seen as “family money”, and who will inherit it.

Issues of mental capacity have to be considered in situations like these, according to James Warner, a consultant in old-age psychiatry.

“Dementia makes people susceptible to manipulation and those involved with overseeing important changes need to be extra-vigilant,” he says.

The elderly and vulnerable can quickly find themselves in situations where they are extremely vulnerable, he says, and more needs to be done to protect them.

The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) holds power of attorney records for more than eight million people in England and Wales, but last year it investigated less than 1% of the cases brought to its attention.

Labour MP Fabian Hamilton says the OPG can be “toothless” for vulnerable elderly people and their families.

Mr Hamilton says changes are needed to provide greater safeguards, and his private member’s bill on attorney powers is due for its second reading in June.

The bill – which has cross-party support – would compel banks and regulators to check for issues such as cognitive decline, and greater scrutiny over whether an attorney is abusing their LPA powers.

Barbara thinks that the proposed legislation could have helped in her situation.

“In cases like John’s, where you have this kind of paranoia, solicitors involved with a power of attorney should be making enquiries of the family and verifying,” she says.

Meanwhile, John’s family have had no contact with Amy, unable to forgive the hurt she caused them and what she put her grandfather through.

They say they still do not understand why Amy acted in the way she did. She (along with John’s other grandchildren) had already been given money enough to buy a house each, and she stood to inherit more eventually.

In May 2024, Amy accepted a police caution for fraud – which in law is an admission of guilt – specifically because she had taken money from John’s account after he had returned to Wales, and was no longer in her care.

When I wrote to Amy about this, she replied that she had only accepted the caution to lift the stress from herself and her family, and didn’t regard it as just.

She told me that there were two sides to every story and that all of John’s decisions were made by him in the company of his solicitor. She added that the decision not to tell John’s family anything was at his request.

US Vice-President JD Vance has accused Denmark of leaving Greenland vulnerable to alleged incursions by China and Russia, as he asked its people to “cut a deal” with the US.

Speaking during a visit to the Arctic island, Vance minimised recent threats by President Donald Trump to take over the island by force.

Instead, he urged Greenlanders to sever its ties with Denmark, which has owned the island for more than 300 years, saying the nation had not invested enough to protect the semi-autonomous territory.

An overwhelming majority of Greenlanders oppose the idea of annexation, a poll indicated in January. Greenland’s prime minister has said the US visit showed a “lack of respect”.

And Denmark’s King Frederik also rejected the US plan.

“We live in an altered reality,” said the monarch on social media on Friday. “There should be no doubt that my love for Greenland and my connectedness to the people of Greenland are intact.”

Friday’s visit was initially billed as a “cultural” tour by Vance’s wife, Usha, where she would watch a dog-sledding race, but it spiralled over multiple days of adjustments as the visit attracted scrutiny and security concerns, with multiple protests planned.

Instead, Vance and the second lady were in Greenland for just a few hours, visiting just the Pituffik Space Base, a missile defence facility in the remote north of the island, some 930 miles (1,500km) from the capital, Nuuk.

He used the opportunity to take aim at Denmark, alleging it had to “keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China, and other nations”, without providing further details.

He specifically called out the countries for taking interest in routes and minerals in the region, as the island of 57,000 people is believed to hold massive untapped mineral and oil reserves.

In his remarks, Vance sought to reassure the people of Greenland that the US would not use military force to take the island from Denmark. Instead, he urged Greenlanders to embrace “self-determination” and sever ties with Denmark, which has controlled the region since 1721.

“We think we’re going to be able to cut a deal, Donald Trump-style, to ensure the security of this territory,” Vance said.

“We hope that they choose to partner with the United States, because we’re the only nation on Earth that will respect their sovereignty and respect their security, ” he said, adding “Their security is very much our security.”

The vice-president said the US did not have immediate plans to expand the American military presence on the ground, but would invest more resources, including naval ships and military icebreakers.

“Our message to Denmark is very simple,” Vance said.

“You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under-invested in the people of Greenland and you have under-invested in the security of this incredible, beautiful landmass.”

Along with his wife, Vance was joined on trip by US national security adviser Mike Waltz, and energy secretary Chris Wright.

The outside temperature at Pituffik was -3F (-19 C).

Back at the White House, President Trump insisted the US needed Greenland to guarantee “peace of the entire world” and that its waterways had “Chinese and Russian ships all over the place”.

“We need Greenland, very importantly, for international security,” he said.

“We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of: ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.”

He said Denmark and the European Union understood the situation “and if they don’t, we’re going to have to explain it to them.”

In a statement to the BBC, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen took issue with Vance’s comments.

“For many years we have stood side by side with the Americans in very difficult situations,” she said. “Therefore, it is not an accurate way for the vice-president to refer to Denmark.”

She said Denmark had significantly increased defence spending, but would further boost its investment with more surveillance, new Arctic ships, long-range drones and satellite capacity.

“We are ready – day and night – to co-operate with the Americans,” she said. “A cooperation that must be based on the necessary international rules of the game.”

Greenland’s new prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said prior to Vance’s visit that it showed “a lack of respect for the Greenlandic people”.

In Greenland’s capital of Nuuk, some people the BBC spoke to were not won over by the US overtures.

At a cultural centre in the city, artist Karline Poulsen said: “There are many ways to say things. But I think the way President Trump is saying it is not the way.”

A woman who gave her name only as Nina said: “I’m concerned [about the visit]. This is kind of odd, I don’t like it.”

Her daughter, Anita, said the visit has caused “a lot of uncertainty and a lot of people are worried”.

Since 2009, Greenland has had the right to call an independence referendum, though in recent years some political parties have begun pushing more for it.

Greenland governs its own domestic affairs, but decisions on foreign and defence policy are made in Copenhagen. Five of the six main parties who participated in this month’s election favour independence from Denmark, but they disagree over the pace with which to reach it.

Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland during his first term – and his desire to own the island has only grown with time.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he considered Trump’s plans for Greenland “serious”.

He expressed concern that “Nato countries, in general, are increasingly designating the Far North as a springboard for possible conflicts”.

Qupanuk Olsen, a Greenland politician with the pro-independence party Naleraq, told the BBC the country is taking the US interest in the island very serious.

“We’re afraid of being colonised again. We’ve been a colony for the past 300 years under Denmark, it still feels like it,” Olsen says. “Now another coloniser is interested in us.”

Troy Bouffard, a University of Alaska professor focused on arctic security, told the BBC that Trump is leaning on his business sense to accomplish what he wants in the region, rather than geopolitics or diplomacy.

“If you’re thinking of this issue only in terms of diplomacy, you’re going to miss out on what other options the US might have to close this deal to pressure the main actors into negotiating or compromising,” he said.

Mr Bouffard said the endgame for the US is to a have “much more robust relationship” with Greenland.

One of the potential scenarios could be axing Denmark from the picture, and having the US establish a relationship that replaces Denmark, he notes.

Mr Bouffard suggested it’s possible the US changes the nature of the relationship and takes on some responsibilities that normally belongs to Denmark.

Ana Faguy contributed reporting for this story.