Ghost Brand?

Since "the documentary of the decade", it has taken the better part of two years to charge Russell Brand. Not that I have ever cared for him. I first called him "Toxic Brand" as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation's cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday. As perhaps we have been reminded this evening.

In 2014, when Brand's book Revolution came out as the ideal Christmas present for the relative you hated, then I was as critical as 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. I offered to pay Brand's rail fare to the Durham Miners' Gala, to see how it would have received him.

Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all. But he is innocent until proven guilty.