Labour is still trying to gaslight us over Russell Brand and Ed Miliband. Time to look at the facts.
Russell Brand in a recent court appearance (Image: Getty)
Huge names right across the Left fell for the sex pest after his unlikely conversion into a social justice campaigner. From holier-than-thou Leftie commentators such as Owen Jones, George Monbiot and Alastair Campbell to top Labour figures PM Andy Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, they fluttered around him like moths to a flame. So did Education Secretary Lucy Powell, who was involved in arranging Brand’s infamous 2015 interview with then Labour leader Miliband. Powell was vice-chair of Labour’s 2015 election campaign and yesterday she was on Sky News defending herself. Her words deserve a closer look.
Powell said: “It was a long time ago, obviously and had I or Ed Miliband or anybody at the time had any sense at all that this was someone who was a sexual predator, who was involved in these sorts of crimes or any allegations around that that were known at the time.” She then repeated that: “Those things unfortunately weren’t known at the time.” That’s worth unpacking. Obviously, Powell, Miliband and the rest couldn’t possibly have known about the allegations of rape and sexual assault that emerged in 2023. But we did know one or two things about Brand. Let’s start with the bad-taste stuff and move upwards.
In September 2001, one day after more than 3,000 people were murdered in the 9/11 terror attacks, Brand turned up at MTV dressed as Osama bin Laden. Not a criminal offence, or a sexual one, although MTV sacked him two days later. In 2002, he was sacked by Xfm for reading pornography on air during a Sunday afternoon radio programme. In 2006, at the GQ awards, Brand falsely claimed to have slept with Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly. When confronted by Rod, he admitted the story was untrue. Nothing criminal, but poor behaviour nonetheless.
In his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, Brand wrote about compiling a “victims list” of “the women I’ve wronged as a result of my sexual addiction”. Brand was telling us about his sexual behaviour himself, in black and white, eight years before the Miliband interview. The book sold more 800,000 copies. People knew.
Then there was the Andrew Sachs scandal, or Sachsgate. In October 2008, Brand and Jonathan Ross left a series of lewd messages on the Fawlty Towers actor’s answerphone, boasting about Brand’s alleged sexual encounter with Sachs’s granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. Brand sang: “I said something I didn’t have oughta, like I had sex with your granddaughter.” He then continued: “But it was consensual and she wasn’t menstrual.” Again, poor behaviour.
Brand and Ross repeatedly made sexual jokes at the expense of an elderly man who had not agreed to take part in the broadcast, then treated his humiliation as entertainment. For the record, Ross shouted down the phone: “He f***ced your granddaughter!” Ross also said: “She was bent over the couch.” Miliband didn’t meet Ross but I thought I’d mention it. The duo even joked about Sachs killing himself.
The BBC apologised, Brand resigned from his Radio 2 show and the corporation was fined £150,000 by Ofcom. The regulator described the broadcast as gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning. Sachsgate was a major national scandal, extensively reported at the time. Whatever Powell may prefer us to believe, it was hardly a secret. But no, it wasn’t sexual assault.
Brand also made a grotesque joke about rape and murder. In a recording made for Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast in 2013, he said: “I raped someone once. I killed her after, she’ll never tell.”
To be fair, that recording only attracted widespread attention when it resurfaced in 2023. There’s no reason to assume Powell, Jones, Monbiot, Campbell, Burnham or Miliband had heard it.
In 2014, Jordan Martin published The Devil and Miss Jones, describing an allegedly abusive relationship with Brand dating from 2007 and making allegations of sexual assault. Martin subsequently stood by her account. Brand has never challenged the contents of the book. It attracted limited attention, but it was in the public domain before the Miliband interview.
The major investigations by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4, which brought forward allegations from multiple women, were published in 2023. Brand has since been convicted of rape and three sexual assaults against four women, and sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison. None of that means Powell or Miliband knew about those crimes in 2015. It would be unfair to suggest they did.
But they could certainly have known about Sachsgate, the repeated sackings, the outrageous public remarks and Brand’s own descriptions of his sexual behaviour. And it seems they didn’t make much effort to find out.
One former Labour adviser had her own experience of Brand. Ayesha Hazarika, now a Times Radio presenter, was an adviser to Miliband at the time. When the allegations emerged in 2023, she revealed that she had had a “horrible” experience with Brand in a bar in Edinburgh, where he had behaved in a “sexually aggressive” way.
She said: “If anyone had taken the time to ask me I would have told them that story.” She says nobody asked. That doesn’t mean Miliband or Powell knew about her experience, but it does raise questions about the checks made before giving Brand such a prominent political platform.
Powell also suggested the 2015 interview was held before the social media age. For the record, Facebook was founded in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Sachsgate had been all over the TV and the newspapers, too.
They didn’t need to know about the alleged rapes and sexual assaults to know that Brand was a deeply questionable person to put on a political pedestal. But they did it anyway.