A decade or so ago, Lefties couldn’t get enough of Russell Brand. They’re not so excited about him today.
The left fell for Russell Brand, and regretted it (Image: Getty)
I’ve always felt uncomfortable around men who boast about their sexual conquests. So when three-times “Shagger of the Year” Russell Brand was in his prime, I found him deeply disturbing. Weirdly, mine felt like a minority view, especially in the entertainment industry and, more especially, on the Left. They cast their feminist and basic human principles aside and swooned before this serial shagger, simply because he claimed to be one of them.
The rollcall of the great and left-wing good who prostrated themselves before Brand is astonishing. It includes two of the most powerful men in British politics: Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband. Back in the day, they were all too happy to act like his mate. With Brand now facing a “significant” custodial sentence, they’re behaving as if they’d barely heard of him.
Others include Labour Education Secretary Lucy Powell, former Labour adviser Alastair Campbell and left-wing firebrand Owen Jones. As well as The Guardian newspaper, the New Statesman and, of course, the BBC, which gave him a priceless public platform for years. They all got far too close to Brand and should be burning with shame right now. But they probably won’t be. To be left-wing is to be good and right, whatever you’ve actually done.
Brand won them over by posing as an anti-establishment revolutionary, railing against capitalism, inequality and Westminster. He urged people not to vote, arguing the entire system was corrupt. In 2013, the New Statesman rewarded this creep by handing him the guest editorship of its revolution-themed edition. Didn’t they smell a rat?
Here was a multimillionaire living in luxury, preaching revolution from his velvet chaise longue. And he hardly kept his attitudes towards women secret. In a 2007 stand-up performance, he joked that when selecting women to sleep with, he didn’t like getting “bogged down in things like age, race or whether or not they’re awake”.
In 2013, he joked in a show: “Oh and also I raped someone once. I killed her after, she’ll never tell.” His 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, also described spitting on women and compiling a “victims list” of those he had “wronged as a result of my sexual addiction”. Apparently, picking the names for the list was like “Saddam Hussein picking out individual Kurds”. Hilarious.
Then came 2008’s infamous Sachsgate scandal. Brand and a chortling Jonathan Ross left elderly Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs obscene messages boasting that Brand had slept with his granddaughter. The BBC later apologised. It suspended Ross for three months. Plenty of celebs fell for him too – with David Walliams, Noel Gallagher and Noel Fielding among his famous friends.
You might have thought prominent left-wing luminaries would have kept their distance. But they didn’t. Even though Danii Minogue called him out as a “vile predator” as early as 2006.
In 2014, PM Andy Burnham, then shadow health secretary, defended Brand against allegations of hypocrisy over his tax arrangements, tweeting: “Keep going @rustyrockets.”
Burnham also praised a Brand article about Margaret Thatcher as the “best thing ever written by a West Ham fan”. Brand had written: “I always felt sorry for her children.” Charming. Although given the Left was singing “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” after Thatcher’s death, that’s positively mild.
Then came Miliband’s extraordinary 2015 election courtship. Desperate to attract younger voters, Miliband agreed to be interviewed by Brand at his London penthouse. Powell helped arrange it, while Campbell declared: “I, for one, was glad when I heard Ed Miliband had said yes.”
Owen Jones also wrote that “Russell Brand matters”, urging Miliband to embrace the comedian. Anyone who heeds Jones has what’s coming to them.
Nobody is suggesting they knew about the crimes for which Brand has now been convicted. Miliband was in two minds about the interview, but felt pushed into it. Burnham just wants to be everybody’s mate. Yet Brand’s public behaviour was hardly invisible. His sexual swagger and shabby attitude towards women were all out there. And I loathed it at the time. Oh and in case you wondered, I loathe Donald “grab ’em by the p***y” Trump too.
The Guardian and New Statesman gave Brand a platform, credibility and an audience. Will it destroy their reputations? Nope. They’re the good guys, aren’t they? The righteous ones who lecture the rest of us. Even after they’ve had their pants pulled down by Russell Brand.