Priti Patel was ambushed by campaigners on a Zoom call over her plans to crackdown on protests in a new Bill.
As the Home Secretary insisted the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill will stop people 'preventing children from getting to school, and ambulances getting to hospital', activists held signs which read, 'KILL THE BILL'.
The Home Secretary seemed un-phased as the signs began to flood the Zoom screen.
She was speaking to a group of young Tory activists remotely last week, and joined by Tory MP for Carshalton and Wallington Elliot Colburn.
The pair were holding a Q&A session for young blue campaigners wishing to learn more about up and coming Conservative policies.
But Mr Colburn became increasingly agitated as the call went on - saying: "I have no idea how these lefties got into the call."
After Ms Patel's lengthy opening speech he opened the call for questions - but the questions were more than the two MPs bargained for.
A member of the Green New Deal Rising group made a surprise appearance in the Q&A session, asking why Ms Patel was pushing this bill - which will jail some protesters for six months - through Parliament.
She said: "We have freedoms in our country and we're very, very proud of our freedoms.
"But actually, we are changing our laws... to stop disruption to our way of life and disruption to our economic way of life as well.
"And certainly in the two years where I've been home secretary, we've had the streets of London, we've had streets of other cities, that have been brought to a grinding halt.
"We've seen children not being able to get to school. We've seen people stranded in ambulances when they desperately needed to get to hospital. That is why we are bringing our laws in.
"Everyone has the right to protest and the freedom to protest that is the right of our democracy in our open society.
"But alongside that, there are legal ways of doing that and right and proper ways of doing that and causing the type of harm and disruption that we have seen has been very, very counterproductive, I feel as well, and the police will talk about this very vocally, in terms of police resourcing the cost of them when they could actually be spending their time protecting our streets and protecting the vulnerable people that actually need help and support."
But as the Q&A was coming to an end and hundreds in the call weren't able to get their questions in, campaigners flooded the Zoom chat and screen.
A source from the group told the Mirror: "They zoom bombed Priti Patel to make it clear to her the kinds of things we want introduced in the bill.
"We want to be able to raise our voices - that's part of a functioning democratic society."
One campaigner questioned: "Why did you put me in prison for drumming at a protest?"
Another asked: "Would you have arrested the suffragettes for being too disruptive?"
And seconds later, the chat was flooded with the slogan 'KILL THE BILL'.
Nervous Mr Colburn wrote in the chat: "Apologies to those of you who genuinely came here to ask questions.
"I have no idea how these lefties got into the call.
"I will be asking CCHQ to review how they monitor who is let into these calls."
A Home Office source told the Mirror: "It's not going to rank very highly on the list of UK protests.
"She would have happily spent the entire session answering questions and explaining why we are doing what we are doing."
It comes after protesters took to the streets across the UK to decry the police and crime bill which is reaching its final stages in parliament.
On Saturday, Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti told a crowd at Parliament Square: “This right-wing, authoritarian Government used to encourage pro-Brexit demos and statue defenders when it suited them.
“This Government bangs on about free speech and whinges about cancel culture.
“It talks a good game about China and Russia and every other place in the world where fundamental rights are under attack.
“But free speech is a two-way street.
“And do you know what? The ultimate cancel culture, it doesn’t come with a tweet – it comes with a police baton and a prison sentence for non-violent dissent.”
Former labour leader Jeremy Corbyn added: “This sense of disempowerment is designed to have a depressive effect, particularly on young people.”
As it stands, the bill would put protesters at risk of lengthy prison sentences and hefty fines for actions that cause “serious annoyance”, which could be done just by making noise, and for anyone found guilty of damaging a statue or memorial.
Amendments added to the bill by the Government in the House of Lords in November make it a criminal offence to obstruct major transport works or attach oneself to objects or people, and would equip police with the power to ban named individuals from demonstrating or even using the internet to encourage others to do so.
Labour members in the House of Lords tweeted that they will be “opposing protest clauses added late on” to the wide-ranging bill in Monday’s votes.
Peers are in for a marathon session tonight as votes are set to go on until the early hours of Tuesday morning.
