Good riddance to the insane cult of Russell Brand

So the curtain finally falls on Russell Brand. Or rather the cell door is slammed on him. The lanky, slimy git has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault. The man who hoodwinked the liberal elite with verbose bollocks about revolution before becoming the God-botherer-in-chief of the crank right will now only have a cellmate to dump his word salads on. Thoughts and prayers for whoever that turns out to be.

The Brand case was both horrible and entirely unsurprising. The court heard how he pinned women down, mauled them in hallways, ignored their pleas to stop. He used the ill-gotten stardom showered on him by TV stiffs and liberal editors – fools paralysed with awe by his windy charlatanism and sixth-former word-vomit – to surround himself with young women. Then he preyed. He now faces a hefty jail sentence.

Yet is anyone shocked? JK Rowling put it best when the charges were first brought against him: ‘It’s always the ones you most suspect.’ He had serious sex-pest energy. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but you should if he’s 37 and still wearing spray-on jeans and 17 necklaces. Brand fancied himself a velvet-clad raunchy dandy, Byron in eyeliner, when in truth he was just a wrong’un. He might have titillated the posh left and later the batshit right with his salacious gibberish, but there wasn’t a normie in the land who’d let their daughter within a mile of him.

He’s faced his legal reckoning but now we need a cultural reckoning. It’s time to turn the spotlight on every Oxbridge muppet who fell for the grift of a man whose only skill was stringing together five-syllable adjectives in a chimney-sweep accent. Long before he became a digital John the Baptist for Tucker Carlson and incels, he was the dahling of Britain’s liberal (sic) intelligentsia (sic). Looking back, it was completely mental.

The BBC lapped up his drivel like a cat at milk. He was hardly ever off Newsnight, chewing the cud with Jeremy Paxman and Emily Maitlis about ‘revolution’ and whatnot. There was a period in the 2010s when it felt like we were all living in a Chris Morris skit. In 2013, he guest-edited the New Statesman. ‘My first act is to edit the name of the magazine to the Nude Statesman’, he wrote. Good God. How we survived that cringe decade I shall never know. ‘We’re delighted to be working with someone as entertaining, inquisitive and provocative as Russell Brand’, wrote then NS deputy editor Helen Lewis. It was the Brand cult summed up: a knackered old left so starved of cultural relevance and charisma that it was willing to debase itself for the synthetic buzz of a celebrity’s ‘wit’.

Brand was like a pied piper of all the worst windbags on Earth. His Nude Statesman brought together Naomi Klein, Alec Baldwin and Gary Lineker. No public gathering of the wankerati is complete without our Gaz. Brand wrote columns for the Guardian. He did public events for it too, including the creepiest brocialist get-together ever recorded when he and Owen Jones beguiled a middle-class crowd with airy drivel about ‘revolution’. Funny thing is that when a revolution did occur two years later – Brexit – all these almond-milk arseholes blubbed like babies.

Jones was Brand’s top fanboy. ‘Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried’, he infamously wrote in 2015. ‘Russell Brand matters’, squealed Jonesy. ‘He is listened to by hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Britons.’ No he wasn’t. These people lived in a fantasyland. Brand returned the favour by christening Jones ‘our generation’s Orwell’. Can we please add the desecration of Orwell’s name to his list of crimes?

The right was just as bad. When the left was done with Brand – finally realising he wasn’t actually the messiah in low-crotch jeans – the right lapped him up. He converted to Christianity and became a garrulous fixture in MAGA-adjacent circles. He got down on his knees on stage with Tucker Carlson to appeal to his ‘heavenly saviour’. What was it Christ said about praying? That you should not ‘do it on the street corners, to be seen by others’? As recently as September, he appeared at a conference with RFK Jr and JD Vance.

The Cult of Brand really was insane. The midwits and lightweights of both left and right built an altar to this one-trick carnival act. They mistook theatrical eccentricity for revolutionary fire, and verbosity for genius. No, none of these people bear any responsibility for the crimes he committed. But they did buff his ego. They did flatter his manic eccentricity. The Brand circus was hard proof that there is none as gullible as the elites. They saw a guru who would lead Britain to revolution or America to Christ, where the rest of us just saw a twat and a predator.