Natalie Geraldine Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (pictured) has dropped her posh voice and adopted a 'mockney' accent

Rich, privileged and with A-level exams finished, Natalie Geraldine Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes embarked on what in posh society is known as a ‘gap yah’ (That’s gap year, to the rest of us).

The well-connected cousin of actors Ralph and Joseph — whose family coat of arms, featuring three ‘lions rampant’ and a seated wolf, is in Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage — spent what she described as a ‘really busy summer travelling around Europe’ with a friend called Ottilie.

Then she went to India ‘for a few months’ before enrolling at Leeds University to study English.

So far, so typical for a fully paid-up member of the gilded elite who attended £27,600-a-year Westminster School.

Or so you might think, were it not for an episode when Ms Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes went to Blackheath Common in South London to eat, sleep and party with hundreds of dreadlocked eco-warriors at Climate Camp 2009.

Billed as a ‘training event’ for environmentalists to learn about ‘climate science’ and ‘civil disobedience’, it attracted hordes of upper-crust teenagers.

Before long, they’d turned the radical gathering into what one newspaper mischievously dubbed a ‘gentle middle-class festival’ fuelled by ‘Twiglets and Marks & Spencer sandwiches’.

A Mail reporter found Ms Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes and her friend Ottilie attempting to erect a flowery tent made by the fashionable designer Cath Kidston.

Cynical readers might have scoffed, given the incongruity of this jet-setting duo turning up at an event dedicated to combating climate change. But fast-forward seven years.

Today, the once well-spoken Ms Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is no longer a naive teenager.

Instead, she has adopted a ‘mockney’ accent and joined the ranks of full-time eco-warriors she first met on Blackheath Common.

In keeping with this transformation, she also appears to have adopted their lifestyle of ‘civil disobedience’.

And this week, the 25-year-old found herself in Westminster Magistrates’ Court facing criminal charges for bringing one of the nation’s busiest airports to a standstill.

She had been arrested with eight other middle-class radicals who staged a demo at London’s City Airport earlier this month on behalf of Black Lives Matter.

Her group of protesters, who are all white, decided to sabotage the airport because planes contribute to climate change which, they claim, has a disproportionate effect on ethnic minorities.

Around 130 flights were delayed, diverted, or cancelled, affecting 9,000 passengers and costing them, airlines and the taxpayer (who must foot the bill for policing the illegal protest) a huge sum.

Ben Tippet (left) has been involved in protests about student tuition fees and the arms trade, while Richard Collet-White (right) led a demo against high food prices while at uni

Deborah Francis-Grayson (left) is a vicar's daughter who has a long record of protesting against fracking in Sussex while Sama Baka (right) travelled to Palestine last year to demonstrate against Israel's occupation of the West Bank

Their punishment? District judge Elizabeth Roscoe handed out conditional discharges each for aggravated trespass and ordered to pay £95 prosecution costs.

When she told them not to repeat the crime, Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes muttered ‘go white privilege!’ — an apparent reference to claims that white suspects get better treatment in courts.

Such a lenient punishment sparked widespread criticism and will be of little significance to a young woman who, despite telling the court she supports herself by babysitting, enjoys a pampered lifestyle.

Although she’s never had a proper job (after leaving university, she completed a PhD at London School of Economics), she lives with her wealthy parents at their £2.5million South London home.

Her father is a successful author and publisher who now has a technology firm that runs an online social network for musicians.

Also staying with her parents is Natalie’s close friend Ben Tippet, 24, an LSE graduate who has joined protests against student tuition fees and the arms trade, and who was also prosecuted for taking part in the airport protest.

Sam Lund-Harket (left) devotes his life to 'grassroots climate activism' while Alex Etchart (right) is the son of a friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

The couple are typical of those who belong to a grungy, far-Left protest movement whose leading lights share, in the main, one defining characteristic: they have enjoyed immensely privileged lives yet hate the system that has given them such advantage.

Almost all can afford not to have jobs or are in full-time education — at a stage in life when their less fortunate peers must pursue a career.

There’s Richard Collet-White, 23, an Oxford graduate whose parents divide their time between a four-bedroom detached home near Milton Keynes and a farmhouse in the picturesque Fleet Valley of south-west Scotland.

An accomplished musician, who sang tenor in a chapel choir and was in the Oxford University Association Croquet Club, it seems he was radicalised when he was elected president of Exeter College at Oxford and led a student strike against ‘high’ food prices.

Two years after getting a degree in French and Russian, he’s unemployed, appearing to devote his life to environmental protest.

Last November Esme Waldron (left) and William Pettifer (right) were fined £200 for wilful obstruction of a public highway at Heathrow airport but promised to continue 'direct action'

Similarly, there’s Deborah Francis-Grayson, daughter of the Reverend Robin Grayson, a vicar from Slough.

Having studied at Cambridge, the 31-year-old is still in full-time education — studying for a PhD in media and communications. She has a long track record as a protester.

In 2013, she was one of six anti-fracking demonstrators arrested for locking themselves to a fire engine outside a fracking site in Sussex.

Then there is Sama Baka, 27, whose retired parents live in a villa in Provence with a pool, which they let for up to £1,700 a week.

When she’s not with them, Baka sleeps on a houseboat called the Northern Soul, currently moored on the River Stort in Essex, and she appears to spend her time travelling the world to take part in protests.

Last year, she travelled to Palestine ‘in solidarity with the population resisting the illegal Israeli occupation’ and climate change rallies in Paris as part of a group which ‘swarmed the streets on our bikes, surrounded by anti-capitalist chants, and then danced under the Eiffel Tower’.

Baka shares the houseboat with Sam Lund-Harket, 32, another of the London City Airport nine.

Raised in rural Devon, the son of a contract manager, he went to a state boarding school in Plymouth and studied architecture at Oxford Brookes University.

The nine activists were arrested after taking to the runway at London City Airport in a Black Lives Matter protest. The demo disrupted flights and affected 9,000 passengers

A former resident of a ‘community garden’ built by squatters near Heathrow, he devotes his life to ‘grassroots climate activism’ and has been a key figure in groups Climate Justice, Energy Democracy and Global Justice Now.

Then there is Alex Etchart, 26, who calls himself a ‘community musician’ and has a degree in social anthropology and ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

He’s directed a theatre show, the Sex Workers’ Opera, performed by burlesque dancers.

Etchart, whose father Julio is a photographer and chum of Jeremy Corbyn, grew up in North London and attended the Camden School for Girls (which has a co-ed sixth form).

Known as ‘the Left’s finishing school’ on account of the wealth required to live in the area, alumni include actress Emma Thompson and many of the offspring of Labour supporters.

Etchart’s mother lives nearby in a street where one property recently sold for £2.5million.

Several members of the nine-strong group in court this week are thought to have first met at the anti-fracking protest in Sussex before becoming self-styled race-relations activists.

Others share long-standing links to the anti-aviation movement. Indeed, two of the group were previously prosecuted for chaining themselves to a van parked across the entrance to a road tunnel providing access to Heathrow, causing the cancellation of flights and creating chaos that lasted for several hours.

One was 23-year-old Esme Waldron, who attended Churston Ferrers Grammar School in Devon and was once named media and performing arts student of the year.

Now a Sussex University film graduate living in Brighton, she’s a self-proclaimed expert on lesbian culture — recently making a film called Now You See Me, about older lesbians.

It has, alas, been viewed by just 70 people on YouTube.

Waldron, who carried out the Heathrow protest on behalf of an organisation calling itself Plane Stupid, says she has travelled in Australia, Bolivia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Lithuania, New Zealand, Peru and the U.S.

Quite how she squares this long-haul travel with her campaign against the air industry is unclear.

The other former Heathrow protester was William Pettifer, 27, the son of a company director, management consultant and yachting enthusiast who lives in Hampstead.

Pettifer’s current home is a 112-acre organic farm in Somerset which provides free food, lodging and accommodation to volunteers who agree to work on the land.

He also spent a portion of the summer at a climate camp in Berlin, though how he paid for all of this is anyone’s guess.

Last November, Pettifer and Waldron appeared in court following their Heathrow protest charged with wilful obstruction of a public highway. They were fined £200 and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £20 victim surcharge.

Outside court, Pettifer said: ‘It turned out better than I was expecting, I expected more.

'We will be continuing direct action — this won’t put me off doing things that are necessary.’

So it quickly proved.

And with this week’s fine for the London City Airport offence, it will doubtless be only a matter of time before these surprisingly privileged young men and women try to once more cause untold misery for passengers — most of whom have to work for a living and pay the taxes that subsidise the lives of those who so hate our system — at one of the country’s busiest airports.