Too many conservatives have got Russell Brand wrong

Hindsight is always 20:20, but there’s a peculiar savagery to Noughties culture, a time when reality TV reigned supreme and the ill-treatment of women often went well beyond innocuous laddishness. In a nadir in its history, in 2008 the BBC broadcast a clip of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross leaving obscene voicemails for the actor Andrew Sachs, sexually humiliating his granddaughter Georgina Baillie. 

Bullying on TV had long been rife; well before Ross and Brand, there was Ian Hislop’s cruel treatment of Paula Yates on Have I Got News for You. Yet it is telling that this moment, which should have rung alarm bells, propelled Brand to greater stardom – enhancing his subversive “bad boy” credentials. 

Now it is claimed that this debasement of the public sphere reflected allegedly awful behaviour behind the scenes. The Dispatches documentary portrays a culture in which the “talent” could get away with anything. Runners on the show which Brand fronted reported being expected to behave like “pimps”. One accuser – then aged 16 – claims Brand used a BBC limo to pick her up from school. Brand denies all the allegations of serious criminality made against him.

At peak Brand-mania, he was lionised and feted, appearing at the London 2012 Olympics in his persona of lovable rogue Artful Dodger. A motor-mouth of incoherent ramblings, he delivered his patter at machine gun pace, the grandiose vocabulary bamboozling his admirers. He was hailed as a representative of “yoof” culture, interviewing Stephen Cottrell, now Archbishop of York, and Ed Miliband, who canvassed his endorsement in the 2015 election. 

Prospect magazine readers voted him “the world’s fourth most influential thinker”. The BBC and Channel 4 exploited Brand’s profitably pig-headed antics – anything pour épater la bourgeoisie. All this happened long after the Sachs prank-call. Putting aside the Dispatches allegations, he hardly hid his predatory behaviour from the world. 

When that transgressive cultural moment passed; and comedians like Frankie Boyle pivoted from mocking disabled kids to woke moralism, so Brand pivoted, too. Reinventing himself as a wellness guru, he moved towards the fringe, amassing a vast cult following and becoming a figurehead in a new form of crank politics. 

In keeping with the the political horseshoe theory, sections of the very online hard-Left and hard-Right increasingly coalesce around shared ideas: vaccine scepticism, a pro-Putin stance on Ukraine, dismissal of the mainstream “sheeple”, and the idea that we’re being lied to by “globalists”. 

The movement has its evangelists like Brand, and lifestyle gurus such as Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist influencer who leapt to Brand’s defence. So did the far-Right radio host Alex Jones. “Anybody that challenges the globalists, that challenges Big Pharma… is going to be accused of assaulting women,” he said. On the other side of the horse-shoe, ex-Corbynite MP Chris Williamson and former Respect Party leader George Galloway seemed to imply that shady forces were at work in the accusations. 

It’s too easy to laugh off, or dismiss, conspiracy theories such as the “Great Reset”; the idea that the World Economic Forum used Covid lockdowns as a pretext to establish a tyrannical new global order. During the pandemic, politics was conducted unforgivably. The period saw not just authoritarian government overreach, but supposedly “moderate” voices promoting abhorrent things; school closures, vaccine passports, the vaccination of children without parental consent. 

Some so-called conspiracy theories, like the Wuhan lab leak, have emerged as quite probably true, though the hypothesis was widely censored in media and academic circles. So I feel some sympathy – though having seen politics and journalism interacting first-hand, cock-up not conspiracy is usually the order of the day. 

But the Brand acolytes are wrong that nobody, including in “mainstream media” outlets, questioned this at the time. Writers like Matt Ridley and Alina Chan produced excellent, detailed evidence for a possible Covid lab leak. Individuals like Lord Sumption voiced objections to lockdowns, rooted in liberal principles rather than conspiracy. Brand and his ilk were not, as some claim, the lone voices of supposed sanity in a world gone mad. 

Some now insist that Brand is being targeted for his YouTube channel’s success; others that blanket UK media coverage proves some coordinated smear. But this is what happens when a major news story breaks, from a by-election upset to the death of the late Queen. The job of newspapers is to seek the truth. Many cases wouldn’t even reach trial without media exposure. Maintaining the vital presumption of innocence until proven guilty is one thing; viewing the entire story – years of sober, forensic investigation by responsible news outlets – as an “MSM hoax” is quite another. 

The conspiracy mindset cannot be allowed to replace the conservative one. That way lies the US politics of polarisation – and with it, madness. The Republican Party has been captured by its conspiracist element, and the likes of Mitt Romney – a man once derided by the Left as the apotheosis of the Right – are no longer welcome. A sense of morality must lie at the heart of conservatism: the Brand case offers a lesson this side of the Atlantic on why the Right must not go so far down the rabbit-hole that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between right and wrong.