As I emerged from Westminster tube onto Whitehall, the other morning, I came across three women dressed in the XR red-goddess outfit at the top of the steps. With faces painted chalk-white, they had linked their raised hands and were descending quasi-ceremonially. Londoners, being fairly unimpressible — like the residents of any megacity — simply wove around the trio and hurried to their next meetings. But the scene brought an awful lot of things to mind. Whatever else you might say about them, the performative weirdness of XR does make you think. Not about the environment, so much as the cultural and moral tributaries that go into making a protest of such oddity.

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There’s the pop-cultural reference points, of course. With the echoes of films such as the appalling V for Vendetta, it feels like those involved are doing what they think people ought to be doing when protesting. The parade behind Westminster Abbey of elderly people in silver cloaks with ensigns protruding from their heads was another such moment. It all was the product of a particular type of person: affluent-seeming, elderly, well-informed and significantly mad.

The scenes on the pavements of Whitehall put me in mind of an older reference: Samuel Pepys, who had married and worshipped at the nearby church of St Margaret. At various points in his Diaries, in gaps from relating his latest amorous guilts, Pepys will note the emergence of some new oddity of the city. The emergence, for instance, of a new group of ‘fanatics’ — in one case comprising a group who begin stabbing Londoners at random for some newly discovered apocalyptic cause.

London has seen cults and sects come and go since Roman days at least. But there is something about XR that is fascinating precisely because those involved both seem to be putting themselves in that lineage and yet would resist the comparison. This time — they insist — it really is the end of the world. All the earlier fanatics were just faking it.

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There were moments in their performance that were quite convincing. It was sobering walking behind Downing Street at night as that day’s activists crept from tent to tent in their St James’s Park campsite. The dimmed torches allowed you to make out the signs of the various communal spaces that had been set up: a food tent, an A&E tent.

The protestors were enjoying themselves, as people tend to do when they are permitted to break the law, but they were serious. And in the quiet, and with the low light, it did feel for a moment as though this were a prelude to what might happen if a city like London ever did run out of power. I recognised the feeling from a novel I read earlier this year, a marvellous, reissued book by RC Sherriff called The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon crashes into the earth and those who survive have to find ways to reorganise and bind together in the aftermath. People congregate in London and eke out their last days in the city.

There is human solidarity in such moments, at first, as there was at XR’s protests, despite the extraordinary inconvenience it caused. But though it all seemed to point to one purpose, it wasn’t the one that those involved claimed.

The claimed purpose has been put under the national microscope this week; it has been a pleasure to watch Britain doing what it does best by allowing the fanatics of XR to explain their arguments across the airwaves. Nobody could begrudge them or the broadcasters the opportunities this presents. The fanatics get to try to put across their point of view, and the broadcasters attempt to help by exposing them. There is nothing unfair about this. It is the give and take of democracy.

On Sky, two perfectly pleasant and reasonable sounding women explained their case. The presenter asked them whether they would prevent patients getting to St Thomas’s hospital and the viewing public was given a fine opportunity to see the reasonable and fanatical minds both struggling for supremacy in the same heads. On the one hand, a pre-agreed line had to be held. On the other, lives were at stake. What to do?

They did what people always do — which is to delay. The nice young lady explained that people who had medical emergencies could speak to the XR people blocking the bridge and could perhaps be let through as an exception. No particular thought had been given to the St Thomas’s question at an organisational level. So here was one of the fanatics trying to balance being extreme and being human live on air.

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Andrew Neil, meanwhile, did what he does best and forensically exposed the most outlandish claims that the group makes. Taking serious studies and building a great pile of exaggeration and assertion on the top of them would appear to be XR’s operating mode. Turning ‘possibly’ into ‘certainly’, truncating timelines, making worst-case scenarios into certain-case scenarios and much more has this week been demonstrated — by Britain’s broadcasters — to be what XR does second best.

But what it does best — its actual purpose — is something that has got almost no attention this week even though it is visible just beneath the surface of the pantomime. In The Times on Thursday, a man called David Copus was quoted. A software engineer aged 47, Mr Copus had apparently taken unpaid leave in order to be at the protests in London. And he was clearly gaining a lot from it. “This struggle bonds you to people immensely,” he said. “I feel like I’m really doing something with such purpose. I’m going to find it very difficult going back to work after this.”

And having observed them for a week, I would say that Mr Copus’s is the authentic voice of XR. Who would want to return to their IT job when there is an apocalypse to warn about and prepare for?

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The predominance of white people at the protests. The predominance of elderly people. All pointed to the great chasm which the modern democratic world sees scant need to address but which groups like XR provide. It is the ever-present gap of meaning and purpose.

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

XR has risen — and will fade — like similar fanatical movements before it. But aside from some happy memories for the participants, the thought it most clearly leaves behind for me is the question of why, when people in modern democracies reach out, yearning for meaning, XR answers their call.

The Tory svengali Dominic Cummings may think the Today programme is no longer required listening for the political class, and others may deride Humphrys as a dinosaur, politically incorrect and overly hectoring of guests. But I have always found him charming and fair — even when I was on the receiving end of one of his kickings.

We debated religion a lot, both on the radio and around his kitchen table. He even wrote a book about it: In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist – the subtitle, as he acknowledges, he lifted from me.

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But it was his interview with Rowan Williams that I will remember the most. It followed the Beslan massacre in 2004. Chechen militants had taken over a school and massacred a great many of its children. Humphrys’ opening question to the Archbishop was a classic: “Where was God in that schoolroom?” Deceptively simple, direct, short, devastating. It was also the question of a man who was the first reporter on the scene after a mountain of coal debris had collapsed upon a primary school in south Wales in 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. And you could hear that in his voice.

The archbishop didn’t answer straight away. He paused for what seemed like an eternity, some might say unable to answer. I would say: he was giving that impossible question, and the deaths of so many children, the respect it deserved. It wasn’t a cheap question and it didn’t receive a cheap reply. In one moment of electrifying radio, the so-called problem of evil – something debated by philosophers since time immemorial – came alive. “That interview led to … the biggest reaction by far to any programme I have done for the BBC in more than 40 years of broadcasting,” Humphrys later wrote.

It may not be this for which he is remembered. He skewered Tony Blair, in 1997, on the political TV show On the Record for accepting a donation to the Labour party of £1m from Bernie Ecclestone. Labour, which had just come to power, soon after exempted Formula One racing from a tobacco advertising ban. “I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am,” said Blair in the interview. A quote that hung over the rest of his political career.

Humphrys’ destruction of his then boss, George Entwistle, for his failure to stop a Newsnight programme that mistakenly implicated a Tory peer in allegations of sexual abuse – the so-called “dead man walking interview” — was an example of speaking truth to power of the highest order. Entwistle resigned as director-general of the BBC 12 hours later.

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Humphrys’ passing feels like the end of an era. Paxman, with his similarly pugnacious approach, went fishing years ago. Perhaps it points to what Cummings said, about how these set pieces and titanic clashes of male egos on the mainstream media no longer have any effect on voters. Interviews only matter when they can be culled for 20 second ‘gotcha’ moments perfect for social media. But such clips don’t change people’s minds about anything by way of reasoned argument – they are little more than digital hand grenades bounced around on Twitter.

So is the political interview past its sell by date, now no more than old fashioned gladiatorial combat for a handful of political anoraks? I hope not.

I have, with Confessions, begun to appreciate much more what is involved in making an interview work. I know, for instance, that I have a fatal weakness as an interviewer: a desire for conviviality. This makes me hesitate to ask a question that may introduce a little too much tension in the exchange. What Humphrys manages to do – and others who have become masters of their art – is robustly to challenge their guests without boorishness, yet also recognising that s/he is an agent of the listener to whom politicians are accountable and who don’t tune in for a party broadcast.

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Politicians have become adept at not answering questions. Their strategy is commonly: acknowledge, bridge, comment. Responding to a line of inquiry they do not like, they first nod to the question being asked, as if this was to answer the question, then bridge to the thing they really want to talk about – something like, “but the most important thing here is…” – then comment on that, with long sentences and few full stops, thus not allowing the interviewer the opportunity to return to the question. The best interviewer is able to disrupt the way interviewees have come to ‘manage’ conversations.

And at this, Humphrys is the master. He doesn’t care too much about being liked. And so he often isn’t. But he is right when he once said that the key quality for a good interviewer is curiosity. And that’s precisely the problem with the social media use of interview clips – they have substituted curiosity for the gotcha moment and a re-enforcement of our own prejudices. And with this, the world becomes a smaller and a far less interesting place.

Which is why the Humphryses of this world are now more necessary than ever. And why we should be grateful that Andrew Neil has been given a new show. In a political climate saturated with bullshit – or post-truth, as some like to call it – old school professional sceptics help us all to stay connected with the truth in a world of constant and increasingly sophisticated deception.

There is something singleminded, uncomplicated even, about the determination not to be side-tracked by fancy explanations or charming presentations. Not “why is this lying bastard lying to me” – that is too cynical and disrespectful. But stay focused, come prepared, be persistent, listen hard, remain curious, and keep things simple – there is often evasiveness in complexity. These were the threads Humphrys followed to great effect.

Who will miss John Humphrys?

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