Rolf Harris really did have his art and his music. Although Jimmy Savile had no such accomplishments, he had made his way up as a disc jockey and a manager. But Russell Brand was, well, what, exactly? Nothing special as a comedian, and with little sign of having performed as one before he was famous, he was no great shakes as a television presenter and he was arguably not an actor at all.
No one, or so few people as to amount to the same thing, ever dressed like Brand, or sought to imitate his voice or his mannerisms, never mind his hairdo. Far from being part of “Noughties lad culture”, he was cultivated to counteract it. No one from that would have been considered presentable in political circles, by no means only the ones in which he moved in those days, much less treated as a sage.
In hindsight, the move to MAGA was inevitable, although it involved no identifiable change in Brand’s opinions, such as they had ever been. And what of that now? Will Pete Hegseth’s “You’re fired” moment be livestreamed, as Hegseth had wanted to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan? Who knows what has had to be given to Jason Reding Quiñones to secure the resignation of the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, responsible for Mar-a-Lago and highly likely to be called in over anything serious in the US Virgin Islands, including Little Saint James, otherwise known as Epstein Island?
Just as Donald Trump planned to veto practically everything that was sent to him by the new Congress, which in turn planned to refuse him a red cent for almost anything, his only hope of the confirmation of anyone whom he might realistically nominate to any position is to have it all done and dusted before Christmas. Yes, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton dealt with Congresses controlled by the other side. But Trump is neither Reagan nor Clinton, and the incoming Congressional leadership is also very different from either of those eras.
The Republican Party has just spent north of half a billion dollars on losing Texas at gubernatorial and senatorial level, so it would be looking at a full billion for the 40 Electoral College votes there, which are winner-takes-all on at-large basis, and without which it could not win the Presidency. Ever again. Every one of those dollars would not be spent in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. And then there are the people who will write in Trump because they refused to vote for anyone else.
Now stop wittering about how anything like the Democrats winning Texas or Mississippi was unimaginable in Britain. I was on the platform when Richard Holden won North West Durham, the same night that the Conservative Party took Bolsover from Dennis Skinner. The first local authority that Labour ever won was Durham County Council, which it led for more than a century, but it lost control in 2021, and Reform UK won it by a landslide last year. In 2019, at a General Election, more people in County Durham voted Conservative than voted Labour. Yes, that really happened. A mere seven years ago.
Over the water in Hexham, they have had since 2024 their first Labour MP in history, and their first non-Conservative technically since 1953, but really since 1924, when Douglas Clifton Brown returned as the Unionist MP before becoming Speaker in 1943. Several other seats also have their first ever Labour MPs, with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens having also furnished many places with their first non-Conservatives in anything from several decades to all time. No Conservative MP remains in Oxfordshire, only one out of nine in Berkshire, only two out of eight in Buckinghamshire, and so on. The London commentariat knows a lot about the United States, but not about the United Kingdom, or even just about the South of England.
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