STEPHEN GLOVER: How typical of the Left to fall for Russell Brand, a self-serving charlatan with the morals of an alley cat

The photograph of the odious Russell Brand taken while he was guest-editing the New Statesman in 2013 reveals so much about the Left’s fawning adoration of him.

Brand is shown as Christ surrounded by his apostles – in this case the magazine’s journalists. His pose, and that of those around him, is intended to recollect Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper.

This says it all. Brand as Christ, celebrated by his Leftist admirers. How sick is that?

The media exposed the grotesque sexual behaviour of Russell Brand, who has been convicted of rape and sexual assault. The Times and Sunday Times, along with Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, mounted a lengthy investigation into Brand’s squalid past.

But it was the progressive or Left-wing media, including the New Statesman, that first placed Brand on his pedestal and celebrated him. They ignored his accounts of drug-taking and what he described as his ‘sexual addiction’ in his 2007 memoir My Booky Wook.

The organisations that most energetically promoted him were the BBC, Channel 4 (somewhat ironically, given Dispatches’ later role in exposing him) and the Guardian newspaper.

Russell Brand guest-edited the New Statesman in 2013, with this photo taken with the magazine's journalists based off Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper

The BBC and Channel 4 are accorded a special place in our media pantheon because they are public service broadcasters. The Guardian thinks of itself as being especially high-minded and moral.

In their different ways these media companies tried to make Brand appear both acceptable and fascinating. They suggested – particularly the Guardian – that he had a useful contribution to make to politics and public debate.

Others saw him for what he was – a loquacious, frivolous, foul-mouthed, self-serving charlatan with the morals of an alley cat who had nothing remotely useful to say about politics or life or anything else.

Admittedly some found him funny and in the very early days – Channel 4 took him on in 2004 and the Beeb in 2005 – his sexual conduct was merely repellent. He wasn’t a known rapist and hadn’t been charged with anything at that point.

All the same, BBC executives turned their usual blind eye to his excesses.

Liz Kershaw, a radio DJ who spent more than 30 years working for the BBC, has just accused the Corporation in a newspaper article of having ‘enabled Brand’s behaviour’.

Brand himself has claimed that during the mid-2000s Lesley Douglas, then the BBC’s controller of Radio 2 and 6 Music where he worked, ‘loved me and gave me lots of room – so I took that room’. We can now imagine what he did with it. Lesley Douglas has denied enabling Brand in any way.

If there was any argument for giving Brand the benefit of the doubt, it was dispelled in 2008 when, with his friend Jonathan Ross, he used BBC airtime to leave a series of obscene messages on the answerphone of the actor Andrew Sachs.

Brand and Ross made the most degrading insults about Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, and even cracked jokes about the young woman’s menstrual cycle.

This was utterly despicable behaviour, which – after a public outcry – the BBC finally accepted had undermined the standards of decency it is supposed to uphold.

Even so, Ross was only suspended, while Brand resigned before he was pushed. The aforementioned Lesley Douglas, who had allegedly indulged Brand at the Beeb, also resigned.

By the way, Ross continued to remain friends with his old mate Brand, inviting him twice for a friendly chat on his show on ITV, to which he defected after his falling out with the BBC.

You would have thought that, after the abysmal telephone call to Andrew Sachs, the progressive media would have seen Russell Brand for the disreputable figure he is, but they didn’t. This was particularly true of the Guardian.

Before the 2015 general election, Labour leader Ed Miliband tried to latch onto this ersatz revolutionary in the hope of attracting young Guardianista-minded voters, writes Stephen Glover

It had already chosen to serialise Brand’s egregious 2007 memoirs, and had opened its pages to him several times. Now it began to treat him as a serious intellectual.

The Guardian’s then editor, Alan Rusbridger, invited Brand to the paper’s morning conference on more than one occasion, when journalists were obliged to listen reverentially to his blathering.

Rusbridger has a soft spot for glamorous revolutionary figures. He had become friends with Ronan Bennett, a former Republican activist in Northern Ireland, who was subsequently wrongly accused of being a member of an anarchist group. The two men even co-wrote a television drama.

Brand, though far less intelligent than Bennett, was another exemplar of radical chic. When he produced his book Revolution in 2014, Rusbridger’s Guardian pulled out all the stops.

The paper sponsored an event that beamed Brand live to more than 200 cinemas across the country. He was sympathetically interviewed by the Guardian’s Left-wing columnist, Owen Jones, who on other occasions around that time praised Brand as a Left-wing thinker.

Revolution was in fact an entirely worthless book, about which even the Guardian’s own reviewer, a don called David Runciman, wrote ‘the worst of it is beyond parody’.

Brand admits in it that he ‘can’t get [his] head around economics’ before proceeding to tear capitalism apart. He praises Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (they are ‘sexy, cool, tough’). He also goes on about the futility of voting.

We shouldn’t be surprised that, before the 2015 general election, Labour leader Ed Miliband tried to latch onto this ersatz revolutionary in the hope of attracting young Guardianista-minded voters. It is exactly what a silly ass such as Miliband would do.

But the Guardian is supposed to be a serious newspaper with plenty of grown-up writers. For it to have championed a man of such low morals, who talked less sense about politics than a drunk in a late-night bar, was an act of bewildering misjudgment. Meanwhile BBC2’s Newsnight – then still a formidable programme – interviewed the heroic figure five times. In 2013, when the great Jeremy Paxman was bullied into talking to him, he rightly observed of Brand: ‘You are a very trivial man.’

But much more often he was treated with kid gloves. After his star billing in the nation’s cinemas thanks to the Guardian, Brand proceeded in state to the Newsnight studios, where he was respectfully interviewed by Evan Davis.

In 2017, after the publication of his book Recovery, he was encouraged by a sympathetic Emily Maitlis on Newsnight to talk about his addiction to drugs and sex (the latter of which he said he ‘used to medicate and to feel connected’).

Not long after this, Brand began his almost certainly self-serving journey towards evangelical Christianity and the Trumpian Right, whereupon the Guardian, the BBC and Channel 4 lost interest in him as a thinker.

There is a French phrase ‘La Trahison des Clercs’ – literally the betrayal of the clerks. It means the jettisoning of intellectual and moral integrity for reasons of political expediency.

That is what the progressive Left has displayed towards Russell Brand. It didn’t care about his drug abuse or sexual incontinence and his obvious lack of respect for women. He was fashionable and he was cool – and he could be deployed to disrupt civilised values.

How did we become a country that could celebrate a fraud such as Russell Brand? This is the mournful question I ask as this empty man awaits his sentence for rape and sexual assault.