Two Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have been arrested after smashing the glass cover of a painting once famously slashed by a suffragette.

The pair were held on suspicion of criminal damage after Diego Velazquez’s The Rokeby Venus was targeted at the National Gallery in central London on Monday, the Metropolitan Police said.

In 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson attacked the painting with a meat cleaver in a protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst.

JSO said students Hanan, 22, and Harrison, 20, used safety hammers to smash the glass covering the artwork.

It added: “Politics is failing us. It failed women in 1914 and it is failing us now. New oil and gas will kill millions.

“If we love art, if we love life, if we love our families we must Just Stop Oil.”

Read more: Sunak to give green light to system awarding oil and gas licences every year

It is the latest in a string of stunts, which have seen demonstrators throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting and glue themselves to the frames of other masterpieces.

Meanwhile, the Met said they arrested at least 40 JSO activists who were slow-marching in Whitehall, with some of those held around the Cenotaph, according to protesters and an officer.

A mother-of-one who was lying handcuffed at the base of the war memorial said: “They arrested us in the road and we were dragged to the pavement and then back over here.”

One officer said the protesters had been moved to the site “to get them off the road”, adding: “It was for their own safety.”

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The climate change group, which is calling on the government to stop all new gas and oil projects in the UK, is currently carrying out a four-week campaign of demonstrations.

Dozens of protesters have already been arrested for actions including slow marching on major roads.

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