On Brand

It’s his padmate I feel sorry for. Cruel and unusual punishment. Now, how about anyone, anyone at all, in the Epstein Files? Still, since Russell Brand applied for bail as a convicted rapist, one trusts that the judge will conclude that he was as arrogant and entitled as ever when sentencing him, remarkably speedily, on Monday. One among several telltale incidents in the infernal My Booky Wook, which I read only during this trial, has Brand amusing himself by teaching his dog not to come upstairs, luring him upstairs, and then kicking him back down the stairs again. He has always shown us what he was.

The treatment of comedians as sages started in earnest in the 1990s, but its roots were in the “satire boom” of the early 1960s. There was of course a connection through Have I Got News for You?, which apparently is still on despite having started the process that made Boris Johnson Prime Minister. For as long as most people have been alive, some public school Sixth Former from 1959 had been telling us all what to think. If that was ever funny, then it no longer is. Spitting Image was largely obsessed with the mere physical features of the mere Royal Family, and all that anyone ever said about that was that it was not as funny as it used to be. Had they considered that never really had been? But that set behind all of that also retains court jesters from the lower orders, who are almost everyone compared to them, and one such was Brand. On which comedy circuit did he cut his teeth? Did anyone ever see him live before he had been on television? He was entirely manufactured, he was not the only one, and he still would not be.

This site has a six figure readership every day. And I do mean every day. For several years, I have checked on Boxing Day and found that I had had that many readers even on Christmas Day. On every continent, too. So it is important to point out here that a lot of Brand’s generation, which is my generation, never liked him. Especially on the Left. 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. In 2014, I was as critical of Brand’s book Revolution 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, a fact gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. Calling him “Ayn Brand”, 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. That was how he was treated when, aged 40, he encouraged the young not to vote in 2015, leading Ed Miliband to give what was presented as an immensely important interview to Brand on YouTube. By then, Brand had been favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and he had guest edited the New Statesman, on the back of holding the same views as he held now, views to which his sexual behaviour was and is fundamental. And so back to the Epstein Class.

The jury took its time before delivering its unanimous verdicts of guilty to some charges and not guilty to others. There is no reason to doubt Brand’s guilt of the offences of which he has been convicted. There is every reason to doubt that anyone was remotely surprised, and every reason to note that Brand’s activities bothered no one in power when his unchanging political position moved from being associated with Hollywood, Channel 4 and the BBC, to being part of the coalition behind Donald Trump. Thankfully, those tendencies have both been given an electoral kicking in their shared country of origin. Think on.