Andrew O’Hagan decided to get the boat from the United States

A LITERARY icon has told how travelling by boat from New York has made him “determined” to give up flying for good.

Renowned author Andrew O’Hagan, three of whose novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, arrived back in Primrose Hill in December, after a seven-day journey by boat from the US.

“It almost made me determined to never get a plane to America again,” Mr O’Hagan told the New Journal. “Yes it [flying] is more convenient, but how much are you going to do with you life, if you’re worrying about shaving a few minutes, hours, even days off.”

The journey from New York was accompanied by a literary festival, but Mr O’Hagan said the low-emissions were a highlight, and it was “a great way to get back to the UK”.

Indeed, the novelist, who has been outspoken on climate issues for more than a decade, said environ­mental “panic” prompted a big decision to give up his car three years ago.

“It was an environmental decision, triggered by the panic that I was pumping out a whole lot of unnecessary garbage into the air just to get to Sainsbury’s on Camden Road,” Mr O’Hagan said.

“I was always a user of public transport, but now I am exclusively so. My family make a joke about my dad-generation obsession with bus numbers. I am someone who unapologetically carries bus timetables around with them. In London, we do have the best transport system in the world. It’s fantastic that you can step on to Haverstock Hill and put your hand up and a bus is almost on its way to meet you.”

Mr O’Hagan won critical acclaim for his book Caledonian Road

As people feel ever more disillusioned and disempowered with regards to the climate crisis, Mr O’Hagan said it was important to take matters into your own hand and “put your money where your mouth is”.

“It’s that age old question of ‘what did you do in the war daddy?’. What did I do in the environmental war? Well, if it was driving my car from King’s Cross to Primrose Hill then that’s a let down, that’s a failure.”

The award-winning writer was amongst a hundred high-profile names to sign a letter in support of Extinction Rebellion in 2019.

That year, the group organised a protest by more than 10,000 people and parliament later declared a Climate Emergency.

Since then, however, XR, and many other protest groups including Just Stop Oil, have ceased action as a government clampdown on protest has become ever more severe.

Mr O’Hagan said: “The government has taken a somewhat aggressive attitude towards the inconveniences that are instituted by protesters. That’s the point of protest. It’s not working if it doesn’t inconvenience middle-class people going to and from the work place, doing what they are trying to do. Creating a bit of chaos, alerting the public’s mind to the larger inconvenience of environmental disaster is the point.”

Nearly 7,000 climate activists have been arrested in the UK since 2019, many simply for blocking roads or doing minimal or non-lasting damage to public property.

“We feel that if someone makes a bus late, they are committing a capital atrocity. In fact, those are already committed by people fracking, or drilling oil, or committing savage acts of vandalism on our planet,” the writer said.

Mr O’Hagan added that the Prime Minister was not doing enough to solve the ever-looming environmental catastrophe.

“There’s always so much in a government agenda, but this is something that should be right at the top,” he said.

“We should be able to see clear blue water between the Tories and Labour, and I don’t see that. I see muddied water, and that is unfortunate.”

The Caledonian Road author further told the New Journal that Sir Keir Starmer should be using his influence in the White House to push Donald Trump towards taking climate change more seriously.

“What evidence can our government show that they have used this ‘special relationship’ to press a very right-wing American attitude to environmental improvement?

I would like to see them put pressure there, because even a fraction of movement in the Trump position could have a major international impact,” Mr O’Hagan said.

As a father to a 21-year-old, the novelist warned that climate change was now far from an abstract notion, and day-on-day becoming “infinitely concrete”.

He told the New Journal: “It [climate change] constantly plays on my mind.

“I realise that in this way, and not only in this way, my generation might have done badly to protect resources and the futures of our children.”