Late last year, when Russell Brand's tiresome book came out, I was as critical of it and of him as was everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star.
We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand. That fact was also gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent.
Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have teenage children, but who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all.
Still, there would not be much point in a debate where the protagonists already agreed.
As for David Cameron's claim to have better things to do than to meet Russell Brand, at the time we all thought that it was Tony Blair who had an entourage so trashy that no subsequent Prime Minister could ever surpass it.
How little we knew.
Jeremy Clarkson, Katie Hopkins, Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, Patrick Rock, and those are without mentioning Ministers of the Crown. Although, thankfully, not Ministers of the Crown for very much longer.
Brilliant. Good to see you joining the chorus of Brand-sceptics of the austere and cerebral old leftie persuasion underneath Owen's Guardian article.
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