Less than a year before that crisp Sunday, Brand had been publicly accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. He denied any wrongdoing. He was subsequently charged with seven alleged offenses and today stands trial for them at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, together relating to allegations dating from 1999 to 2009.

To some, there was something opportunistic about the timing of Brand’s religious rebirth. But the more interesting story is what kind of Christian he would go on to become. For he did not simply become a tea-and-biscuits Anglican: he moved, like a moth to a flame, toward a distinctively American religious and political ecosystem, one whose ideas about rebirth, persecution and personal testimony fit both him and the American Right strikingly well — even as the same trends are now following Brand back home to Britain.

Brand came to Christianity via Grylls and Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church in South Kensington. Yet if British Christianity offered him a font, that was about it. Within days of the baptism, Christian magazine Woman Alive cattily argued that it was too soon to hold him up as an example of God’s redeeming power. A few months later, Brand gave the publication’s pearl-clutching readers something else to worry about: he began baptizing people himself. One self-released photograph showed him officiating in a pair of white budgie smugglers. The convert was fully dressed. One vicar quoted in Premier Christian News quipped that he had baptized a great many people over the years — and had somehow always managed to keep his clothes on.

County Road 30A couldn’t be more different from South Kensington. Running for a little over 20 miles along the Florida Panhandle, following the northern spit of Florida until it reaches Alabama, 30A is lined by beach towns, whose tin roofs and picket fences evoke a dream of small-town America. Locals dart between pastel villages by golf cart, past pale quartz beaches and the Gulf’s turquoise water. Seaside, the area’s main town, was the set for The Truman Show, a 1998 film about a man living inside a television broadcast and whose neighbors, unbeknown to him, are all acting for the cameras.

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Brand moved his family here in the autumn of 2024 — a few months after his baptism, and just before Trump’s re-election — explaining that he could no longer live in a country whose media, government and judiciary would always find a way to muzzle anyone who became an inconvenience. He did not come as a man hiding from the limelight. Neighbors reported seeing him as a permanent fixture at the Saturday farmers’ market; he cycled through Seaside calling out blessings to passers-by; one morning in December, after bumping into a group of groomsmen on the beach, he accepted their invitation to the wedding later that day.

Brand worships at Good News Church in Santa Rosa Beach, which invites people to be “born again through Jesus”. In November 2025, The Times reported that he had begun baptizing willing converts in a penguin pool at the Emerald Coast Zoo, a nearby Christian-themed attraction. Never one to miss an opportunity to furnish his followers with devotional content, Brand posted the footage himself with a penguin emoji. It’s an odd thing to watch: the shirtless celebrity, the solemn words, the tilt-dunk backwards, all in the company of a colony of flightless seabirds going about their business. Then again, this is Florida, America’s great subtropical carnival of roadside oddities, religious revivalists, get-rich-quick schemes and anti-government eccentrics, a place where the sacred and the absurd have always rubbed shoulders.

A parody to many Brits, Brand is legible to Florida in a way he could never be in Henley. He has also landed in a place where his new faith sits comfortably alongside almost everything he already believed. The wealthy, photogenic beach towns of 30A are hardly a wilderness of sackcloth and penance. Here, Christianity, biohacking, hot yoga and Pelotons coexist with remarkably little friction. A man who has spent decades moving between spirituality, addiction recovery, yoga and anti-corporate politics barely has to change his clothes.

From the churches of 30A, Brand quickly found rather more powerful friends. Among the first was Sean Feucht, a long-haired, guitar-strumming evangelist and Trump devotee, whose ministry has been dogged by allegations of financial mismanagement. By February 2025, a few weeks before he was charged, Brand was lauded at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by America’s Future, a conservative organization that campaigns for “durable institutions” and “liberty”. There, Brand was handed a glimmering “Global Defender of Freedom” award, sharing the bill with Mike Tyson and the singer Ted Nugent.

Then, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Brand opened his speech on his knees, thanking God for the example of forgiveness set by Kirk’s widow. He told the crowd that the words “turning point”, to him, meant repentance. When he replayed the speech a few days later on Stay Free with Russell Brand, his video podcast devoted to politics, spirituality and the supposed evils of the establishment, the episode came with a giveaway promoting Reborn, his own wellness brand, and which sells the sort of biohacking supplements beloved by the American alternative-health movement. First prize was a Jeep Wrangler and $10,000 cash.

Brand’s website continues in a similar vein, inviting visitors to join Awakened Wonders, a subscription community with whom he reads and prays weekly. The mailing list promises subscribers their “place on the ark”. Videos end with a nudge towards a premium channel on Rumble, where subscribers can join the “movement”. And this spring came a book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, 192 Tony Robbins-endorsed pages and yours for $19.79. The publisher: Tucker Carlson Books.

As these examples imply, Brand has entered a religious culture with few issues blending money and faith. From the television evangelists of the Seventies and Eighties, with their enormous hair, enormous congregations and even more enormous bank accounts, to the prosperity preachers of today’s megachurches, certain strands of American evangelicalism have proved remarkably adept at reconciling God with Mammon. Faith need not mean renunciation; it can promise abundance, better health, greater happiness and a more successful you. The language of salvation has mingled with that of self-improvement, and the American pulpit has become a platform from which to sell both.

It helps, too, that behind Brand’s swelling online following — 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and more than two million more on Rumble, a self-styled free-speech alternative — sits an architecture of belonging that he’s been building for years. Long before his conversion, Brand was cultivating a community of the supposedly awakened, first through online sermons railing against the mainstream media, then through podcasts and live events promoting his particular brand of enlightenment. Christianity has furnished the enterprise with a new vocabulary, especially given his new political contacts, but the business model is remarkably familiar.

Theology plays a role here too. “Born again” is a phrase from the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that no man will see the kingdom of God unless he is born anew. For much of Christian history, this was interpreted as the slow, lifelong work of worship. It was the Protestant revivalists of the 18th century who turned it into an event: a datable, theatrical moment in which a person becomes something new.

American evangelism has always had a special fondness for the “twice-born”. Take the revivalist minister Charles Finney, leader in the 19th century of the Second Great Awakening. He would seat the unconverted on an “anxious bench” at the front of a tent and publicly wrestle with their souls in full view of their neighbors, establishing “testimony” — confessional, mea culpa monologues — as a form of popular entertainment. It’s a short hop, conceptually at least, to the Emerald Coast penguin pool. The spectacle attracts the faithful; the faithful become followers; and followers, as Brand knows better than most, can be monetized.

Compare all this to British Christianity. Charismatic Anglicanism — the CofE’s emotionally expressive branch that emphasizes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit — may have given  Brand a theology of dramatic renewal. But it also came embedded in a national church whose instincts run pastoral and discreet, in a country where public displays of piety are more likely to provoke embarrassment than applause. The American habit of treating salvation as both a public spectacle and a commercial opportunity has never quite taken hold here. In Britain, a celebrity finding Jesus is more likely to raise eyebrows than confer authority. In America, though, finding Jesus can be the beginning of a lucrative new public life, even the start of a second career.

As Brand’s embrace by Magaworld implies, meanwhile, this is especially true given the broad political context. The New Apostolic Reformation, the radical fringe of the American charismatic network, whose ideas have shaped figures like Feucht, now talks about Christians conquering the “seven mountains” of culture: from government and media to education and the arts. “We want souls, and we want nations,” declares Lance Wallnau, one of the movement’s leading evangelists. And, under Trump, this vision of politics as spiritual warfare has found a receptive audience. A 2025 survey found that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants sympathized with or embraced Christian nationalist ideas. To be clear, not all these belong to the NAR, but the numbers suggest how far this fusion of faith and politics extends. Certainly, on 6 January 2021, as rioters stormed the US Capitol, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation gathered outside, blowing horns, speaking in tongues and praying for angels to drive a demonic serpent from the Senate. For them, the struggle for political power was quite literally a battle between heavenly forces. In this cosmology, opposition from the press or the courts can be read not just as mere politics, but as a kind of spiritual resistance, a sign the believer is doing something right.

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Some of the congregants of Santa Rosa Beach remain unconvinced by their neighbor’s transformation. Josh Parish, a local Christian real estate agent, was quoted as saying he thought Brand was “a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman”. But to those who want it, a language is available — woven through its politics and increasingly through its churches — in which demonetization, de-platforming, hostile coverage can be narrated as the familiar sufferings of the faithful.

Little wonder Brand continues to make inroads into politics. In September, he appeared at Washington’s lavish Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, moderating a discussion on healthcare reform with senior Trump administration officials. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary RFK Jr were also on the program. The spectacle captured something of the new American Right: evangelical Christianity, alternative medicine, self-optimization and political grievance mingling in a movement that has made suspicion of established authority practically a qualification for belonging. Brand, whose joss-stick spirituality and conspiracy-laden sermons have made him an increasingly eccentric figure in British public life, has found himself a place amazingly close to the center of US power.

And in a sign, perhaps, of how strong American culture-war currents now are, something similar is now happening back across the Atlantic. Where the nationalist Right once invoked Christianity largely as a marker of British heritage, some of its more radical figures are increasingly embracing the language of evangelical revival. Tommy Robinson, for instance, claims to have found Jesus in prison. Last year, at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London, crosses rose above a sea of St George’s flags; crowds chanted “Christ is King”; and a minute’s silence was held for Charlie Kirk. All this dismays many British church leaders. “The church is not the chaplain to any political tribe,” stressed Mike Judge, editor of the Evangelical Times. The Church of England, from which Brand’s religious journey began, has also joined Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist leaders in warning against misusing the cross to exclude others.

Yet more than politics or commercialism, there is one more way of looking at Brand’s conversion: as the latest in a long line of reinventions. After all, he has spent most of his life killing off previous versions of himself. There was Russell Brand the heroin addict; Russell Brand the priapic MTV presenter; Russell Brand the Hollywood actor and husband of Katy Perry; the revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism; the wellness guru; the anti-establishment broadcaster who railed against big pharma, big data and the global elite. Christianity has offered him perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet, albeit with the added promise of eternal life.

The book purports to be a practical guide to conversion: self-help, except that the idea is to give your sinful self over to God, following the path Brand himself has purportedly trodden from debauchery to devotion. Conceptually — if one can use a word like that in this context without immediately collapsing into hysterics — the project is loosely based on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, of which Brand is also a fan. This means there are tasks to complete at the end of each chapter, including some fearless and searching personal inventories. For instance: “One by one, go through the seven characteristics of God. Where are you clenching?”

There are also prayers composed by Brand for readers to recite, though fans of the Nunc Dimittis should not get their hopes up (“Almighty God, Beloved King. Dad. Dad. Alright Dad. You are everything that is and could be and you love me.”) There are arguments with ChatGPT about biblical interpretation; a comic dialog between the Old Testament’s David and Nathan; some blather about how Brand’s vision is of a cool hipster Jesus, not the dusty old geezer beloved of Songs of Praise (“They made the Son of God as appealing as a cat-tongue enema”). But really these aspects are window dressing, a desultory pretext for what Brand has always liked best — talking about himself.

In circuitous fashion, he describes the personal events that have drawn him to Christianity, from the genuinely harrowing (his baby son facing open heart surgery) to the relatively quotidian (the death of his dog). The writing gets most focused when explaining how accusations of rape and sexual assault have been rustled up against him by shadowy elites, putting the demon into demonetization in order to stop him talking truth to power about Covid jabs. And there are also a few enjoyably savage jibes about his ex-wife’s new globalist squeeze.

Most of the time, though, the prose style is so unbearable it eclipses every other consideration. To call this a stream of consciousness is an insult to consciousness — it feels more like a fugue state. There are attempts at ecstatic lyricism that could just as easily be diary entries of a teenage serial killer: “Consider that within you… there is a portion of the divine, shooting, roaming, spreading, and searching, and the function of the world is to entice, enchant, wrap, and shellac it, a new and choking womb”.

Other metaphors are similarly lunatic: “My wife bears some wound of the woman, some mythic anathema to me, the man. Yet, like the island of Japan, she knew that trouble would come if she opened up her shores.” Then, punctuating the grandiose drivel, come hairpin lurches into the old Nineties Britpop tweeness: feet as “tootsies”; food as “mouth munchy din dins”; the disciple John as “needy and queeny”. And it turns out Brand hasn’t even read the Bible at all, but only Nicky Gumbel’s The Bible in One Year.

There is also the disingenuity of the timeline. It may be traditional to take conversion stories at face value, but I’m afraid I’m calling it. Brand was charged in April 2025 with historical offenses of rape, oral rape, sexual assault, and indecent assault, said to have been committed between 1999-2005. The case has yet to come to court. The charges followed a year or two of newspaper allegations and civil suits from alleged victims, during which he had plenty of time to get a new spiritual story straight.

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Having flirted with the wackier edges of the wellness movement for a while, his conversion to Christianity came in 2024, marked by an unassuming little baptism in the Thames, with celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls as the celebrant. Within three months, Brand was himself performing full immersive baptisms in his Y-fronts, again in front of cameras: “It might seem a bit soon to be baptizing people, but the Apostles did it on day one, so here we are.”

To call his new role as celebrity preacher brass-necked is an understatement. Even Jonathan Aitken waited 18 years before he dared become a vicar. Yet in Brand’s version, there is no need for circumspection because he is innocent. Though keen to play up his “broken” past, he says that he would never rape anyone, and besides, there was never any need; sinful fornication with willing “shopkeepers and realtors and masseuses and waitresses and photographers and doctors and lawyers and movie stars” was already available to him. Or as he also puts it, apparently unaware of events in Genesis: “If you own an orchard, you don’t steal apples”. Indeed, apart from Jesus, the biblical character Brand seems to identify most with is David and his “adulterous, exploitative, wrong, but consensual seduction of Bathsheba”.

Of course David was also famously a slayer of giants, an image to which Brand seems strangely drawn as he fights his own Goliaths: the powerful figures in the background who foisted vaccines upon the world, secretly engineered the destruction of the Twin Towers, want you to consume porn, don’t want you to read the Epstein files, and aspire to control “all trade, banking, communication, biometrics, attention, life itself”. And if that sounds potentially a bit antisemitic, I think you might be right. There’s a weird rant early on in the book about the “satanic” globalist message behind Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, said to be favored reading both of Obama and the “slobbering Santa Claus of the New Order”, WEF founder Klaus Schwab. (There are also disclaimers that do a bit too much protesting: the book is “admittedly excellent”; and “I’m not suggesting that Yuval Noah Harari is evil, by the way, or anything other than a nice man and a good writer”.)

As I watched Brand promote his book on the Tucker Carlson show this week — prefaced by another freeform prayer that certainly had me clenching — I wondered whether it was wise to have written it. The project seems quite risky. During one of his motormouth livestreams, viewers susceptible to Brand’s charms can mentally zone in and out while doing other things, and come away with a distracted impression of sincerity, humor, or cleverness. But when forced to concentrate on his words on the page, placed in consecutive order and shorn of the accompanying visual circus, the mirage disappears.

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And I can’t think the book will sell many copies. The crunchy hippies and anarchists still in his audience, carried over from lockdown, will presumably remain unmoved; while the newer MAGA lot don’t need lessons on the Bible from a louche foreigner dressed in leopard print. It is impossible to imagine anyone being persuaded to attend church for the first time after reading this book.

But perhaps — along with atheism — more organized forms of Christianity still have something to gain from the spectacle. Shaped by the internet, narcissistic obsession is a spiritual blight on our times, the unsilent killer of meaningful lives. The norm for millions is now to spend life in a haze of self-fascination, curating social media outputs obsessively, trapped in fantasies of approval or disapproval from others and feeling like one’s entire worth depends on the fact. Brand seems vaguely aware of this in his book, calling his earlier self a “living endorsement of promiscuity and aspartame narcissism”, but then simply folds the convoluted insight into yet another round of compulsive peacocking, with the cross as a prop.

Organized Christianity contains many an antidote to this contemporary poison: the emphasis on humility and self-sacrifice, the call to private good works, the primary focus on the quality of one’s relationship with other people and with God. Whether or not the so-called quiet revival is real, it seems there is spiritual hunger abroad, and unexpected movement towards Catholicism and Orthodoxy, even amongst younger people. The reasons for this are unclear; but an underrated explanation is surely the relaxing absence of the self during participation in the ancient rite. You can empty your mind out, let the old words flow, and become part of something greater.

For anyone sickened by the constant mental pressure of the tawdry self — and the way that modern forms of Christianity so easily bend to it — it helps to have someone like Brand in the world as an object lesson: a living embodiment of what happens when self-obsession takes the wheel and calls it Jesus. The man himself won’t care, though; negative attention is still narcissistic supply. And anyway, he has other things to think about: not least, his newly-announced intention to run for the London mayoralty in 2028. If you’re thinking of a spiritual retreat in a monastery — perhaps somewhere with a strict no-internet policy — now might be a good time to plan it.

So goes the biblical tale of King David and Bathsheba. In the stories that followed, Bathsheba was often depicted as a lascivious trollop who had offered herself to him on a plate. She was asking for it. Women — and not just women — were forever lusting after David. Even the Bible swoons over his good looks: “He was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome.”

A post-MeToo reading of David and Bathsheba would tell the story in a very different way. It would emphasise that he was a dominant man, a king no less, full of the “vertigo of success”, as one commentator put it, and she was a vulnerable woman, whose husband was away fighting at the front. Did she have a choice? Could she have said no to the King? We don’t know because the Bible doesn’t see fit to let us know her side of things.

This much we do know: when confronted by the prophet Nathan, David crumbles. He composes the 51st Psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Is this self-pity or genuine contrition? It’s hard to tell. But David’s son Solomon had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines — so being sex-mad clearly ran in the family.

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King David, this unprincipled lothario, was the original Messiah. He was the reason a heavily pregnant Mary travelled all those miles to Bethlehem: because that’s where David was born. It was all about the symbolism. Once in Royal David’s city, as we sing at Christmas. David was the once and future king, the high point of Israel’s political fortunes and the anticipated return of them. To speak of the Messiah is to make a political claim as much as a religious one. It is like wearing one of those Donald Trump hats with the words: “Make Israel Great Again.” Jesus will make Israel great again. Or Simon bar Kokhba will. Or Sabbatai Zevi. Or Rebbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. They were all considered by some to be the Messiah, the ones who would return the fortunes to Israel. David returned.

Can King David teach us anything about our disgraced messiahs today? Nearly 10 years ago, Russell Brand began his Messiah Complex tour. “He swaggers on stage with the fanfare of a rock legend, all tight jeans, ripped shirt and glossy hair, and descends into the audience to be groped and drooled over while dispensing grooming tips and gentle mockery,” wrote Stephanie Merritt in a Guardian review. This was the tour on which he fantasised about having sex with his cat, which he blamed for wandering around with its bottom exposed. This obnoxious priapic bully offered up his wisdom about Jesus and messiahs alongside “orgasm impressions and sly digs about marriage”.

Of course Brand has a Messiah Complex. It cannot be insignificant that he looks like someone auditioning to be in a B-movie version of the life of Christ, except with orthodontics that are more Beverly Hills than first century AD. As it happens, that whole flowing locks, loose-fitting shirt Jesus-look is not yet a century old. It was started by a Chicago artist called Warner Sallman, whose Head of Christ (1940) painting became the basis of how millions of people visualised Christ in the 20th century. Brand is just a cheap pastiche. He has 33 tattoos — 33 being the age Jesus was when he died. He said he thought he too would die at 33. It’s all about the empty symbolism.

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But Brand really does disturb me. However much I can’t abide the man, and I think that those who are taken in by him are gullible fools, I can’t help but wonder if this is what messiahs are really like. It bothers me to say this, but Brand and King David really do have more than a passing similarity. Both coming up from nothing and both “thrown into a washing machine of tits and money” (Brand’s words not David’s). However much Brand courts it, the comparison with Jesus clearly doesn’t work at all — not least because Jesus’s charisma wasn’t linked to his sexual power. And claiming to be the Son of God might be a delusion too far, even for Brand. But there is no getting away from the fact that the archetypal Messiah, David, is a Brand-like figure.

What can I draw from this awkward comparison? Yes, that charismatics are dangerous — and that we have to find ways to distrust and disrupt the weird psychological proclivity many of us have to fall for manipulative people with power, especially verbal power. This is not an academic problem. I am currently doing safeguarding training for leaders of church congregations, and am reflecting on the number of powerful men in churches who have abused their power over others. The Brand-David comparison suggests to me how deep the problem goes. That seductive cocktail of religion and sex allows some people to have a powerful hold over another, easily abused.

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But I also know that the Bible is not full of plaster saints of unquestioned piety. Far from it, the Bible is a book about lots of dodgy people looking for salvation amid the ruins of their lives. Its central characters are often hypocrites and frauds, both looking for God and avoiding Him. As David is described by one of his many biographers: he “is a man of contradictions, noble and base, lyrical and brutal, all of which coexist in a quieter state in each human breast. We see ourselves in this man, and we see this man in ourselves.” And when I think of someone saying this about Brand, I want immediately to utter “God help us all”. Which, come to think of it, is probably the shortest summary of the Bible I can imagine.

The two years I spent forgetting Brand coincided with him slipping off the radar. But it wasn’t long before he was back in the public eye — and in my life. Before the divide between establishment and anti-establishment became as unbridgeable as it is today, Brand hosted a podcast called “Under The Skin” in which he interviewed smart and thoughtful guests including Jordan Peterson, Yuval Harari, Sam Harris, Lena Dunham and Ekhart Tolle. Although his style could grate a little, with his unnecessarily long words and irksome innuendoes, the show was often fascinating. Brand’s engaged curiosity led the guests in unexpected directions.

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It was 2020 when my wavering fandom solidified into something more concrete. For those of us who looked around and saw no rhyme or reason to the policies bringing our lives to a standstill, who couldn’t understand why anti-lockdown protests of thousands of people in the streets of London were barely mentioned in mainstream news, Brand was a breath of fresh air. There was such a scarcity of public figures questioning the Covid narrative that lockdown sceptics like me were willing to overlook almost all and any character defects when someone voiced an unorthodox opinion. I embraced all the Covid heretics, even those with a slightly unhinged “us and them” mindset. Over the years, however, I had grown weary of all my lockdown “heroes”. All of them, except Russell Brand.

2020 was quite the gateway drug, turning even reasonable people hyper-paranoid. And as Covid policies became a thing of the past, Brand’s channel made the transition from Covid Sceptical to Everything Sceptical. But what set Brand apart from the other “dissenters” was his surprising lack of anger. The monologues on the interests of Big Pharma, the Dutch farmers’ uprisings and BlackRock corruption were passionate and energetic but they were not vitriolic. Although the titles of his videos were cartoonishly clickbaity (e.g. “Shoespiracy EXPOSED: The HIDDEN Truth Of The Shoe Industry”), they were surprisingly un-prescriptive when compared to the monologues of, say, Tucker Carlson. Brand kept them open-ended and his sign-off was always similar, asking the audience to come to their own conclusions based on whatever information he was offering. Some argue that this was a calculated tactic meant to beguile and convince — but conspiracists are hungry for affirmation of their theories, not open-ended invitations to keep thinking.

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Brand might have been noisy, but there was a sanguine note to him. You’d never see him doxxing people on Twitter, nor blubbing about the state of the world like Peterson. Brand’s message was of self-actualisation, as opposed to doom and gloom. Unlike Peterson, who seems to enjoy telling us that “the most fundamental reality is pain”, whose joyless prescriptions and nagging about room-tidying have become headache-inducing, Brand’s whole schtick was defiant cheerfulness. This detached zen-like quality was not present in the Noughties, nor in 2013 when he was convincing me not to vote. It was something Brand has cultivated over years.

I was, after all, not alone in being drawn in: he has 6.63 million followers on his YouTube channel. He was, and always has been, brutally open. His threshold for embarrassment is low which means two things: one, he has on occasion been quite embarrassing; two, he is never too proud to admit he has changed his mind. Few people in the public eye so brazenly U-turn — as he did over voting in 2015 — unless there is something to gain. And not many would willingly set fire to their establishment credentials in the way that Brand did at the beginning of this decade. Before he set up his “conspiracy channel”, Brand was a guest editor at the New Statesman, had a column at The Guardian and was voted world’s fourth most influential speaker by Prospect.

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Since then, the YouTube channel has charted his rocky redemptive path. He speaks often of his sex addiction, his heroin addiction, his eating disorders, his exhibitionism and the guilt he feels for past wrongdoings. But today it seems that his past nastiness plumbed even greater depths than he confessed. Last year, Dave Chappelle coined the phrase “honest liar” when trying to explain Trump’s appeal. It might also help to decipher the hold Brand has over his diehard followers.

Nevertheless, the presumption of innocence is a specific legal doctrine which seeks to limit the potential dangers arising from prosecution by the state. It is the most important decision-making rule in the criminal procedure.

Yet the precise implications of the rule, and the effects that it ought to have, are disputed by lawyers and legal academics. Many, for instance, think that a practice such as the use of the dock in British courts violates the presumption, as it risks prejudicing a defendant in front of a jury. Others disagree. But few would dispute that the core of the idea is that the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Today, English judges are advised to tell a jury that they must be “sure” of a defendant’s guilt before convicting.

The reason for the rule is commonly thought to be to protect the individual citizen from the power of the state, and the presumption does indeed have this effect. Nobody will have their property or liberty taken from them by the Crown’s judicial servants, unless the prosecutor, an agent of the Crown Prosecution Service, is able to make a jury or magistrate “sure” that the person violated the criminal law. This emphasis on liberty, however, obscures another side to this heavy burden of proof.

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When a jury declares itself sure that the law was broken, it also implicitly declares its belief that the state’s immense penal power is being used in the public interest, and not being abused in pursuit of private or factional interests, for personal revenge or political advantage. In other words, the presumption of innocence protects the integrity and the authority of the state as a truly public institution. It reassures us, the Crown’s subjects, that the Crown’s agents are what they claim to be: the representatives of the supposed common interests protected by the criminal law, even if they sometimes get it wrong. That the presumption is a guarantee of the state’s authority is the underlying reason why it is so important in modern nations, and why even obviously repressive or corrupt regimes will often pretend to uphold it.

So, those who claim the presumption of innocence does not apply to public debate about Brand’s guilt are partly correct. The presumption is a core rule of public law which serves critical and specific political functions, and perhaps its name should be honoured by reserving it for legal proceedings. The weakness of their argument, however, is that the same considerations that lead the state to maintain the legal rule should lead ordinary citizens to be very cautious about public statements concerning the guilt of a person accused of wrongdoing.

When people who do not have direct evidence concerning Brand’s alleged offences make arguments that assume his guilt, the rest of us know that, since they neither witnessed anything nor heard all the evidence tested in court, they cannot possibly know for “sure” one way or the other. As a result, they reveal themselves as people who share the qualities of a state that does not maintain the presumption of innocence in its legal procedures.

And this can have certain potency. As John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago, the law and its police, courts and prisons are not the only instrument of censorship. Similarly, they are not the only way to restrict the lives of citizens. Stoking outrage, hysteria and fear in civil society can do that too. Consider how YouTube has already decided to stop Brand making any money from his channel, though none of the accusations is proved.

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Second, those who imply guilt without sufficient knowledge also reveal themselves to be people who are not capable of exercising real public authority, because their commitment to the public interest cannot be trusted. They are willing to defame another person on mere suspicion that the accused might have broken the law. True, they are not claiming to represent the public in the formal way a prosecutor does. Nevertheless, they discount the possibility that the accused may have done nothing contrary to the public interest in order to grind their personal or political axe.

This transformation of a criminal accusation into a political weapon confuses law with politics. Of course, the criminal law is the outcome of politics. When our political representatives decide that it is in the public interest to condemn and exclude a particular wrongdoing from social life, they make it a matter for prosecution and punishment by the state. Whether or not they are right about what is in the public interest is itself what political dispute is about; think of drugs laws or hate speech offences. But it is a serious mistake to imagine that, because law is the outcome of politics, law is a good way to do politics. Publicly assuming that unproven criminal accusations are true for political gain only undermines trust in the good faith of political participants, and trust in public life as a whole.

If the authorities were to take no action, to fail to investigate an individual following public accusations, then matters might be different. But that is a bridge we are not even close to crossing yet. In the meantime, the relish with which some commentators seem to discuss accusations of criminal wrongdoing is a marker of a political culture that is instinctively repressive and simultaneously unserious. It is not even two months since Kevin Spacey was acquitted of similar charges that had served to destroy his career, yet here we are again. Perhaps this time, Russell Brand will be proved guilty. Either way, those commentators who have already proclaimed his guilt will have only reinforced an idea propounded by Brand himself: that they cannot be trusted with the public interest.

It’s still common, though. Worldwide, more than 650 million women were married while still children. Nor is the practice normal only away from the “developed” West: most American states still allow marriage under 18, while California, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington have no lower age limit for marriage at all.

According to one campaign, between 2000 and 2018 in the United States, 222,430 under-18s were married, including 9,530 under-16s. Of those married under 18, 88% are girls. The age-gap in these marriages would often qualify the pairing as a sex crime, absent the legal formality.

Is there anything more paradigmatically “patriarchal” than thinking the solution to inappropriate sexual interest in an adolescent girl by a much older man is to marry her off to him, so he can molest her with the full support of the community? And there is often very little upside for the girl. International studies show, for example, that being married off under the age of 18 is associated with low education, poverty, partner violence, social isolation, and physical and mental health issues.

Given this litany of ills, we can hardly be surprised to see feminists calling for an end to the practice. And the smashing of this sort of patriarchy is going well: according to figures from Unchained At Last, the annual number of such marriages in America has fallen steadily over recent decades, from over 76,000 in 2000 to around 2,500 in 2018. (In Britain, marriage under the age of 18 was banned altogether in 2019.)

But what about the bit of “patriarchy” that involves the sexual molestation of young women by older men, sometimes with much more power? The smashing of that is not going nearly so well. Consider Epstein Island, or the accusations against Harvey Weinstein — some by women who were very young when they encountered him. Or, recently, allegations that comedian and social media star Russell Brand sexually assaulted four women between 2008 and 2013. One of them was just 16 at the time.

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If the allegations against Brand are true, then they fit into a much larger pattern of sexual interest by older men in sometimes very young girls. Not all men, obviously; but clearly at least some of them have this predilection. It’s a pattern shaped by an ugly convergence of public hypocrisy, power, and sex. And a glimpse at the modern history of efforts to grapple with this convergence reveals a grim conclusion: we are busy trying to address everything except the root of the problem.

For even as feminists rightly began agitating on behalf of young women being married off to older men for the purposes of sexual access, the same women’s movement has also promoted ideals that ended up opening the door for the age-old pattern to re-emerge — just without the marriage bit. Even as second-wave feminists began challenging the presumption of early, lifelong marriage for all women, in favour of access to the full range of possible occupations and roles, the arrival of legal and reliable birth control saw that joined to a much more radical programme for sexual emancipation. These calls converged, after legalisation of the Pill, in texts such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970): a rallying-cry for women to abandon the “castrated” condition of bourgeois domesticity, in favour of free, passionate, “deliberately promiscuous” self-discovery.

Many staid housewives were thrilled by the call of freedom. But some of the women “liberated” from bourgeois mores by this erotic libertarianism were very, very young: the same adolescent girls, in fact, who might in a previous era or different demographic have been the subject of a forced child marriage to their abuser. The Bafta-nominated 2021 Sky documentary Look Away records how this played out in the music industry, among the “baby groupies” of the Sixties and Seventies: girls who were groomed as young teenagers by some of the music industry’s biggest stars. Sable Starr, for example, was immortalised in Iggy Pop’s 1996 album Naughty Little Doggie, in which he sings about sleeping with Starr when she was just 13. And Aerosmith frontman Stephen Tyler notoriously persuaded the mentally ill mother of Julia Holcomb to sign over Julia’s custody to him in the mid-Seventies, when she was 16 and he was 25.

Still more modern “sex-positive” feminists might say: if the girls were consenting, so what? Some argue, in fact, that focusing on girls’ sexual “innocence” is itself further evidence of patriarchal efforts to control women’s sexuality. Why shouldn’t young girls explore their sexuality? Accordingly, contemporary “sex-positive” messaging aimed at young people vehemently de-emphasises the idea that lack of sexual experience should necessarily have any emotional or moral significance. “Virginity”, we’re told in one such book, “just doesn’t work any more in today’s world”, because there are too many different possible “first times” to fixate on “a person who hasn’t done a specific sexual act, traditionally a cisgender man or woman who hasn’t had penis-in-vagina sex”.

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This will doubtless be news to the millions of viewers of Pornhub’s “teen” content, a category that consistently makes the website’s annual top searches for men. On the contrary: for some of these at least, defiling this supposedly non-existent innocence is precisely the point. In his memoir, Stephen Tyler recalls his relationship with “Diana”, clearly a pseudonymous Holcomb, in terms that vividly suggest how he eroticised what he saw as Holcomb’s barely-legal cocktail of innocence and experience: “She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it.”

Similarly, “Alice”, the woman who reports having had a sexual relationship with Brand age 16 when he was already in his thirties, says of the moment she told him she was a virgin: “He was like, ‘Oh my God, my baby, my baby’, and picked me up and cradled me in his arms like a child and was stroking my hair. He’s like, ‘You’re like my little dolly.’” After that, she says, Brand was “preoccupied” with her innocence and purity.

If this happened as Alice remembers, it suggests a similar cocktail of protectiveness and objectification to the one that emerges from Holcomb’s account. As Tyler’s ward, she was dependent on him; during the three years she spent as his “girlfriend”, Tyler impregnated her, then later pressured her into an abortion at five months’ gestation. Holcomb, now a mother of seven, only broke her silence when Tyler published his memoir (including the porn-adjacent description of her as “Diana”) in 2011. In a hard-hitting essay telling her version of the story, she alleges that as she wept her way through a “nightmare” late-term abortion, Tyler snorted cocaine off the bedside table every time the nurse left the room.

Since the alleged Brand incidents took place, we’ve had #MeToo, Epstein, and Weinstein; scandals that have, in their wake, brought greater emphasis on consent and attention to the risks posed in sexual encounters by power asymmetries, of the kind that Holcomb experienced. It is perhaps a testament to how the public conversation has changed that last December, some three decades after the fact, she launched a lawsuit against Tyler.

In Look Away, many music industry operatives acknowledged their complicity: carefully not seeing, hiding perpetrators, covering stories up. Whatever the truth of Brand’s behaviour, The Sunday Times report tells the same story. As with Epstein and Weinstein and many other such cases, it points to a grim inference: power and social status almost always counts for more than sex crimes, or young women’s suffering.

We should welcome such a shift in public willingness to ask difficult questions of sexually voracious high-status men. But we shouldn’t imagine a new focus on power has done anything to expunge the pattern itself, any more than ending child marriage did. Rather, the focus on power seems to have come with a corresponding reluctance to focus on those perceived as powerless.

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Accordingly, we find the pattern is still there, and still being given the benefit of the doubt — but this time among men perceived as “marginalised”. Whether due to race (as in the grooming gangs) or gender identity (as in sometimes flagrantly predatory behaviour, by men who claim to identify as women) actions that might prompt a witch-hunt against an out-of-favour celebrity are routinely met with stonewalling, silence, or excuse-making. And meanwhile nothing, to date, has stopped predators from predating. So how do we keep girls safe?

We’ve tried focusing on public hypocrisy, by campaigning to end efforts to make such abuse “respectable” via child marriage. This succeeded in clamping down on abusive marriages — only for the same dynamic to reappear in the “baby groupies”, and every other group of girls and young women whose exploitation has been whitewashed by narratives of “empowerment” or “liberation”. Then, with #MeToo, we tried focusing on the power aspect. That shone a salutary (if arguably selective and politicised) spotlight on the misdeeds of at least some powerful men — even as the powerless go on slipping through the net.

So perhaps it’s time to focus on the third and final dimension: sex. When men abuse very young girls, it may be about many things. It may be legitimised or concealed in many ways, and for many reasons. But it is, in part, simply a sex thing. That is: those men who molest very young girls do it because they can, and because they like it.

If this is so, it has immense implications for keeping girls safe. Effective measures would probably involve a realism about our sexed differences that would translate in practice to (for example) a presumption of suspicion toward adult men that would likely curb the operations of a serial womaniser but would also have far-reaching effects on our currently largely co-ed society. And this is before we get to the implications such realism would have for differential treatment of (and freedom accorded to) adolescent boys and girls.

And, thus, perhaps all of us — even feminists — have arrived at a tacit consensus is that it’s not worth it. That it’s better to blame power, or patriarchy, or whatever. That the overall liberal benefits of staying in denial about this distinctive form of male desire so far outweigh the risk it poses to a minority of young girls that we, too, look away as we sacrifice them in the name of everyone else’s freedom and pleasure.

This was a time when invasion of privacy was de rigueur. Sex tapes made headlines, and no one considered whether their subjects wanted them in public or not. Phone hacking made headlines, too, although journalists rarely admitted in public that this was how they got their stories. Brand, who appeared to have no boundaries at all, was perfectly adapted to the demands of this environment.

Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

On stage and on screen, Brand broke taboos that were already being pushed to breaking point by the indecency the internet was feeding into every home. In stand-up footage from 2006, Brand talks about liking “them blow jobs where it goes in their neck a little bit… them blow jobs where the mascara runs a little bit”. He was talking about the “choking blowjobs” that were being mainstreamed by gonzo porn.

He was also telling us about his own sexual preferences, according to one of the women interviewed by The Sunday Times. She met Brand the same year that he performed that set, when she was 16 and he 31. Towards the end of their relationship, she alleges that he sexually assaulted her by forcing his penis down her throat; after she fought him off, he told her he had “only wanted to see your mascara run”. (Brand denies committing any criminal acts.)

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It wasn’t just his predilections that made Brand right for the Noughties. It was also his talent for making himself into an easily recognised caricature: the priapic man-child with the dandyish wardrobe and the sky-high hair. A cartoonish distillation of Byronic swagger and Kenny Everett nerve. Amy Winehouse was probably the only figure with a more distinctive iconography, and people would sometimes joke that they looked alike.

But such cartoonishness could serve another purpose. Maya Angelou wrote: “When people show you who they are, believe them.” But what if someone shows you a version of who they are that is so extreme that taking it seriously would be tantamount to missing the punchline? In the Noughties, there was no bigger faux pas than missing the punchline. Playing an overblown version of the predator can be an actual predator’s most effective camouflage.

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson defined the raw, hypersexed look of the Noughties in his work for high-end brands and glossy magazines. He claimed his mission was to bring out the “inner porn star” of his subjects (one of his subjects was Barack Obama, who was campaigning for the Democratic nomination at the time). But models claim the “consensual” sex acts he photographed himself performing on them were nothing of the sort. Richardson was dropped by the fashion industry after these allegations, which he denies, were reported in 2017.

When RnB star R. Kelly was indicted for child pornography charges in 2002, he responded, not by purging sex from his music, but by amping it up to preposterous levels, nicknaming himself “the pied piper of RnB”. The music was “scandal-proof”, concluded comic Dave Chappelle in a stand-up segment, because everything that could shock you about Kelly was already in full view. (Kelly was cleared of the initial charges, but convicted of multiple sexual offences against women and girls in later trials.)

This gambit was not a new one. Jimmy Savile had pioneered it, clanking his chains and puffing his cigars and teasing about the things he’d like to do to schoolgirls. (In a radio interview with Savile from 2007, Brand crawlingly begged to meet “Sir Jimmy” and offered to bring along his female assistant, naked.) But the Noughties veneration of knowingness made it extraordinarily effective.

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The no-holds-barred tabloid culture at that time took power away from many female celebrities: invasive tactics meant they had little means of bargaining with the media. But the premium on fame served other public figures well, and someone like Brand was in a position to exercise exceptional control.

That would ultimately contribute to one of his greatest disgraces, when Brand and Jonathan Ross phoned the actor Andrew Sachs during their Radio 2 show and left a voicemail saying Brand had “fucked your granddaughter”. It was ugly and misogynistic, and unforgivably the BBC broadcast it. There were mass complaints, a £150,000 Ofcom fine, and the controller of Radio 2 was forced to resign. Ofcom found that Brand had benefited from a culture of extreme licence, where “the presenter’s interests had been given greater priority than the BBC’s responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy”. When you’re a star, you can do anything, as a man who would be president said in the Noughties.

Brand had his defenders, though. He cultivated a boyish vulnerability that sweetened the corruption. In the remake of Arthur (2011), he takes the role of the eponymous playboy and Helen Mirren plays his lifelong nanny. “He’s merely shaped like an adult,” she tells one of Arthur’s conquests. Mirren extended that indulgence to Brand’s real-world behaviour. “Sachsgate,” she said, had been merely “naughty… schoolboy kind of behaviour”. He was 33 years old at the time of the incident.

Brand would soon be reaching for a more grown-up persona: political activist. His verbal dexterity had always given him a cachet other tabloid regulars did not enjoy: The Guardian used him as a columnist for many years. He guest-edited an issue of The New Statesman. He supported Occupy Wall Street. He wrote a book called Revolution. But Brand’s political awakening did not seem to include a reconsideration of his attitude to women.

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In his material, women still appeared as decorative objects or dangerous temptations: things to be used, or a substance to abstain from. Having caused a minor scandal at the GQ Awards by joking about sponsor Hugo Boss making uniforms for Nazi, he described the event in The Guardian as a microcosm of corporate influence and political corruption, thronging with “birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison”.

Though he railed against oppression and exploitation, there were no signs that he was particularly egalitarian in his private life. “At first when I met him he wanted an equal, and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like: ‘I can’t handle the equalness’,” Katy Perry told Vogue after the couple divorced in 2011. “It was very controlling.”

Brand retaliated with a stand-up riff about Perry being so boring in bed: “I’d be having sex thinking: ‘Think of anyone, anyone else’.” This did little to damage the perception that Brand was not only of the Left, but an asset to the cause. Nor did Sachsgate damage him, nor did Brand’s history of fantasising on-stage about making women cry during sex. Misogyny has rarely disqualified a man from being a socialist hero.

George Monbiot nominated Brand as his “hero of the year” in 2014. “Brand’s openness about his flaws makes him a good leader, and allows those who admire him to be good followers,” wrote Monbiot. “He’s the best thing that has happened to the Left in years.” But Brand’s “openness about his flaws” did not mean he was reformed. It was a strategic move to flannel those who were naive enough to confuse confession with salvation.

In 2015, Brand endorsed Ed Miliband (after previously telling his followers not to vote). “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour — and the Tories should be worried,” was the headline on an Owen Jones column. Brand returned the favour by blurbing Jones’s book The Establishment: “Owen Jones… is our generation’s Orwell and we must cherish him.” The Tories did not need to worry, of course. They won the general election.

But then, Brand’s pivot to politics has always had more to do with his own self-importance than with any interest in effecting actual change. His videos draw viewers down the rabbit hole: their success is in inspiring people to watch even more Russell Brand videos, endlessly clutching at an understanding that Brand, now in full-on messiah mode, promises will soon be revealed to his “awakening wonders”.

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It is too optimistic to say that no one in broadcasting or comedy today could do the things of which Brand is accused. (The allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Dan Wootton, which Wootton vigorously denies, should warn against complacency.) It would, however, probably be harder. Unlike in the Noughties, production staff would be less inclined to turn a blind eye. Runners and assistants would be more likely to refuse to act as procurers, if asked.

A predator looking for a niche would probably not now make DJing or presenting or stand-up their first choice. A predator today would choose to be a social-media influencer: outside restraining power structures, with a direct line to their fans. A medium that allows you to groom thousands of people all at once, inculcating them into a secret world they share with you.

Brand’s transition from mainstream celebrity to conspiracist YouTube guru is perfectly in line with the way fame has evolved. He has always had a talent for turning people into “good followers”, as Monbiot correctly noted. The self-aware degradation of the Noughties in which Brand’s career thrived looks shamefully dated now, but those who hunger for power will always find new avenues to exploit.

Still, who could ever have guessed that the treble-winner of The Sun “Shagger of the Year” award — the self-confessed owner of a “Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory thanks to the ol’ fame” — might stray into territory which the words “rape” and “assault” would feature? Of course, there was that 2015 Mail on Sunday interview with Brand’s ex-girlfriend, an articulate former model called Jordan Martin, in which she said that during their six-month relationship, in 2007, the star was controlling, verbally cruel and sexually assaulted her. She warned politicians such as Ed Miliband — recently interviewed by Brand — to stay away. But the wider media didn’t really want to hear. Exes, eh? And anyway, Brand was box-office: a quick-witted, motor-mouthed Essex Byron in a fright wig and skinny jeans who made scant secret of his predilections, although his rhetoric cleverly shunted them more towards the seaside-postcard end of sexuality: his helpless eagerness to service a non-stop parade of willing dolly birds — “different women three, four, five times a day. In Ireland, nine times a day” — which had intermittently landed him in the sex addiction clinic, alias “sex chokey” or “winky nick”.

There are no doubt numerous women for whom sex with Brand delivered more or less what was expected: a fleeting encounter with celebrity, and a longer-lasting anecdote. The details that emerged from the joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches, The Sunday Times and The Times, however, were grimmer and more shocking. One was of Brand pursuing a star-struck 16-year-old girl, Alice, now a regretful adult. At first, the fact of taking Alice’s virginity was enough to excite him, she said. Later, she alleged, his kick came from spitting in her mouth and compelling her to swallow it; or forcing her into oral sex until she punched her way free. Another woman said he raped her at his LA house, an allegation backed up by her visit to a rape crisis centre, and text exchanges in which she wrote “When a girl say(s) NO it means no” in response to which Brand apologised. Yet another woman — whom he met at AA and later worked with — described a sexual assault from Brand which she finally fought off, reportedly leaving him furious.

Dispatches is not a courtroom, of course, and Brand has not been found guilty of a crime. But, then, this type of incident often doesn’t make it to court, as both predators and victims are acutely aware. They unfurl in territory with which many women are nauseously familiar, but which a certain proportion of men seemingly struggle to see clearly or take seriously: situations in which a woman agreed to one sexual act but not another; or consented to sex on a previous occasion but not this time round. Situations in which a measure of trust is swiftly and starkly betrayed.

Brand, who denies the allegations of rape and assault, is now married with two children. He has created a bolt-hole from cancellation in his social media platforms, flanked by an army of 6.6 million followers on YouTube alone. From there he accuses the mainstream media, or “MSM”, of having “another agenda at play” and seeking to silence him for asking difficult questions about Big Pharma and other hot-button topics. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have already responded to the clarion call with sympathetic comments. Yet the truth is that Brand himself is a creature of the MSM, as he must know. Mainstream broadcasters and media built him up, flattered him, fawned over him and handed him the keys to the sexual “Wonka factory”. And if its previous record is anything to go by, his spell in what Brandspeak might dub “reputation chokey” may not last long.

A brief list of things that — by a kind of communal consensus — the media has ultimately found excusable in the past: John Peel’s penchant for sex with underage girls (broadcasting genius, and it was the Seventies). Bill Wyman’s sexual relationship with Mandy Smith, then 14 (he was a Rolling Stone, for god’s sake, and it was the Eighties). Jimmy Carr’s Channel 4 rape jokes, such as “what’s the difference between rape and football? Women don’t like football” (if you don’t like “spicy content’” don’t listen). Frankie Boyle’s rape jokes about female athletes, and foully relentless gags about the abducted child Madeleine McCann (ditto: anyway, Frankie’s ‘progressive’ now).

If you’ve been around long enough, however, some things stick in your mind — extraordinary pieces of moral blindness, enabled by the media. One came when Dylan Jones, then editor of GQ, commissioned the late A.A. Gill to write and direct a porn film. What could be more “outrageously funny”, as Jones recalled in 2016, than to see “the country’s best critic immersing himself in the seedy world of hardcore pornography”? Until you read it, that is. Perhaps wisely, the article itself no longer seems to be available online. But it’s included in a 2002 collection of Gill’s journalism. In his other pieces there is room for elegant flourishes of authorial compassion, but not here: the subject-matter — commercial sex — has blotted it out.

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The setting is LA, in 1999, and Gill is busy directing his own lurid script. In his own words, a half-Mexican girl called Clarissa – who is “very young and exceedingly nervous” – is being plastered with make-up for her scene, which is with the “truly, madly, deeply hideous” veteran porn actor Ron Jeremy. He’s “funny and he can act” but is considered so unattractive that Clarissa is getting “a $200 premium to do it with Ron”.

Clarissa’s wary of doing porn, but she’s “grateful for the money”. Why, we don’t know: Gill doesn’t ask. Perhaps he senses that her answer might spark the libido-killing onset of sympathy. This is only her second film, and so she isn’t really listening to Gill droning on quasi-ironically “about motivation and the Method”. Gill is contemptuous, describing her as “such a bad actress” and “not bright”. She is “horrified’ when she sees Ron, who — perhaps mercifully — can’t get an erection, and ends up masturbating on to Clarissa’s cheek. After this young girl finally leaves the set in distress, Gill — having orchestrated the entire grotesque scene — follows her out to ask “Are you all right?”. Ever the English gent.

A coda to the article: earlier this year — due to advancing dementia — Ron Jeremy was deemed incompetent to stand trial on serial charges of rape and sexual assault, involving 21 victims aged from 15 to 51. Allegations dated back to 1996, three years before the making of Gill’s Hot House Tales. The comments beneath the news reports were telling: many were sceptical, asking why Jeremy would “need” to do this, given the numerous sexual opportunities afforded by his work. They appeared unable to consider an alternative scenario: that Jeremy was so steeped in the mores of porn plots — and his own star status in the industry — that he had lost sight of any sexual boundaries, in particular those of consent.

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These real-life stories aren’t about sex, freely if recklessly exchanged in mutual appreciation: the happy, heady original vision of sexual liberation. Instead, to varying degrees, they’re about porn, ego, power, money, cruelty and humiliation. Some men saw the direction of travel early. In 2001, the novelist Martin Amis also travelled to an LA porn set, not to direct a movie but to write about the dynamics on set. Amis wasn’t exactly a feminist saint: he’d once cut a swathe through literary London, leaving women stung by his infidelities, and was sometimes accused of misogyny in his depiction of female characters. But he wrote about the performers with feeling, and in his brilliant and disturbing article “A Rough Trade” he recognised straightaway where the industry was headed: “the new element is violence”.

The thing that Amis feared most in porn’s endless pushing of boundaries to darker places, its taboo-breaking quest for the “polymorphous perverse”, was what it might speak to in the user: that it might draw out the inner “Mister Monster” in him, triggering arousal at something his value-system knew to be wrong. “Porno, it seems, is a parody of love,” he wrote, “It therefore addresses itself to love’s opposites, which are hate and death. ‘Choke her!’ ‘Spit inside me!’ ‘Break me!’”. Amis had perhaps more reason than most to contemplate where male lust, when fused to violence and cruelty, might take society in general and women in particular: in 1994 he discovered that his 21-year old cousin Lucy Partington, an English student missing for 20 years, had been murdered by the sexual abuser and serial killer Fred West.

In the years since Amis’s article, porn has indeed followed his prophecy. It’s more ubiquitous, more extreme and being absorbed in heavier concentrations at a much earlier age. A report by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found that young people were regularly exposed to content in which “pictures of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted at teenage girls”. Earlier this year, the Times journalist Helen Rumbelow wrote searingly about a day spent “watching what the kids are watching” on Pornhub. Of the 32 sites deemed “most popular in the UK”, 12 showed men being physically abusive to women, and 11 featured “pseudo-incest” between step-parents and adult step-children or step-siblings. One of the most popular categories is “teens”: in many videos, young-looking girls, officially over 18, are bound, frightened, or shown with restricted airways. It is deeply chilling to think that — barring actual murder — the stuff of mainstream porn is inching ever closer to the practices of 25 Cromwell Street.

There remain many adult men who instinctively understand the line between consent and its refusal, pleasure and abuse. But online porn culture does not, and its effects have already manifested themselves in real life: in a 2020 BBC Disclosure survey of 2,049 UK men aged between 18-39, 71% said they had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex. One third of that percentage said they wouldn’t ask verbal consent for such acts, either before or during sex.

The 48-year-old Brand is perhaps unusual in his generation for the degree to which he was steeped early in prostitution and porn, starting with the stomach-churning way his father introduced him to sex as a teenager, hiring prostitutes for them both in their shared hotel room. But now hardcore porn is schooling children en masse through their smartphones, while much of the “mainstream media” long ago paved its way by demonstrating that — when it came to women, at least — boundaries of legality and taste could frequently be transgressed at no cost to career. Even as Dispatches puts its spotlight on Russell Brand, the painful reality is that future generations of young women will almost certainly experience much more of the behaviour the programme describes, not less. A.A. Gill and Martin Amis are both dead, but it was Amis who saw the danger and called it correctly. The genie’s out of the bottle: Mister Monster is everywhere.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

More from this author

Why I am an addict

By Tanya Gold

The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

More from this author

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By Tanya Gold

The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

More from this author

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Joker is the story of a lonely man who has been crushed by a materialistic society. He finds a new, stronger self through violence, laughter and the chaos of the crowd. “Rage and Love” summarise it well. But the mischievous anger of the Joker has sunk deeper into the bones of our society over the past 10 years than the latent urges for community. It made me wonder who this mythic figure is that so dominates our age. A half-remembered quote of Lewis Hyde’s came into my head and I looked it up:

“We live in an era of savage order. We have seen bureaucratic finesse used to cause and at the same time justify unimaginable extremes of human suffering… in this model when human culture turns against human beings themselves, the Trickster appears as a kind of saviour.”

Hyde is an American poet and cultural critic. In 1998 he wrote the book Trickster Makes this World, a description of how and why energy turns against order. It traces the Trickster archetype (Hermes, Loki, Coyote, Puck) through myth and art, and shows that he is the direct antecedent of the Joker. They share the same energy and cunning: both are amoral, antisocial and creative reinterpreters of ‘truths’ they recognise as malleable. However elementally mischievous, their trickery has an ancillary social function in burning down and building new orders when those truths become too distant from reality.

Hyde notes of the Trickster: “Just as he can slip a trap then turn round and make his own, so he can debunk an illusion then turn around and conjure up another.”

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Hyde’s book was informed by the cultural victories the Left had won in the 1960s and 1970s. The Trickster was then more associated with iconoclastic artists ripping down the certainties of conventional society and morality, and Hyde pointed out how necessary the Trickster’s mischievous energy was to the rigid order of the other gods:

“The Norse gods are ‘organising powers’ and by themselves cannot bring the world to life; they need the touch of disorder and vulnerability that Loki brings, a point we see by its reverse: when Loki is suppressed the world collapses; when he — and disorder — returns, the world is reborn.”

You couldn’t say that now. The Trickster (if that is who the Joker is, not to mention darker clowns such as the one in It) is feared as the anarchic and dangerous face of populism. Photoshopped images of ‘Boris the Clown’ show a red gash of paint beneath a green wig; Buzzfeed runs pieces such as “Can you pick if Donald Trump or the Joker said these quotes?” Anarchic, localised and tactically cunning, he seems to be a demon of the Right.

This is a misconception though. The Trickster is neither of the Right nor of the Left. He comes from below, his energy and mischievous intelligence arising in response to excessive order. In the 1950s and 1960s, the stultifying order was a societal one: overly conservative after the Second World War, it needed dismemberment and loosening up, a fragmentation that has perhaps gone too far.

Today, the Trickster has a different target: the monoliths of order are economic, political and systemic.

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Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

Markets are no longer free, having been captured by multinational monopolies. Political systems play out on top of huge ziggurats, distant and unresponsive to constituent needs. Metropolitan exclusion zones of wealth and political correctness denigrate the unlucky as unworthy (or stupid). Corporate and governmental systems have come to resemble the software they run on. As a friend said on leaving London recently: “Everyone’s a robot, or else they programme robots.”

However much we fear the Joker of populism and chaos, we half understand that he has risen in response to excessive order and rules. Batman, the humourless wielder of technology, wealth and power, is as much a villain as the Joker.

Indeed The Dark Knight, released in 2008 and the best Joker film before this one, has been impressively prophetic of the past 10 years. At one point in the film, Christian Bale’s Batman claims the mob crossed the line by hiring the Joker but Michael Caine, who plays his butler, Alfred, disagrees: “You crossed the line, sir. You hammered them, you squeezed them to the point of desperation and in their desperation they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” Later, a mob boss tells him: “You got rules. The Joker, he’s got no rules.”

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The Joker himself, in one of a series of broadsides, says:

“Do I really look like a guy with a plan? I just do things… the others have plans, they’re schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer, I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are… nobody panics if things go ‘according to plan’, even if the plan is horrifying… I’m an agent of chaos, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

Whatever your political beliefs, you’ll recognise this in the unreasoning energy that has been unleashed over the past decade. At best it is creatively destructive but it is hardly a state anyone (other than Mao) would see as an end. It is, however, a test: can western democracies accommodate the turmoil excessive order has created or will we double down on order, turning to autocracy to try to end it? Hyde continues:

“There is no way to suppress change, the story says, not even in heaven; there is only a choice of a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the Trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to play with him, better especially to develop styles (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident and some acceptance of the changes contingency will always engender.”

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The Joker understands the significance of their roles more than Batman, who sees order as an end. There is a telling scene in The Dark Knight when the Joker is willing Batman to crash into him, merging their energies. Batman swerves. As the Joker later says: “I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? No, you complete me.” The Joker acknowledges the necessity of opposition. Perhaps, even, of synthesis.

The true culture hero goes beyond opposition into rebirth. Is this still possible? Recent Western history is actually quite promising: the 1970s were if anything more violent and, perhaps through exhaustion as much as anything else, society came to an accommodation with itself. It is hard to find signs of genuine dialogue but there are cultural figures starting to talk to each other across the divide. For me, the brightest glimmer of hope has come from an unlikely source: a series of online discussions between a reformed Joker, Russell Brand, and an awkward Batman, Jordan Peterson.

There are now a couple of videos on YouTube of the two men talking to each other. Both came from working-class backgrounds and rose through the hierarchy, both have an element of mischief and Trickster in them, both are articulate, slightly narcissistic performers. But Peterson is more obviously interested in order, logic and the right while Brand, a comedian who openly draws the links between himself and the Joker, is driven by energy, lateral jumps and Left-wing concerns.

I find it strangely moving seeing the two of them overcome their differences and discover common ground. I challenge you to watch the latest as it warms up an hour or so in when they’re discussing power, myth and markets and not say: “Yes, you’re both right.”

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It is not without effort. The dress sense and body language of the two could not be more different. Brand lunges out of his plunging T-shirt, finger cocked in the air, hand on the back of his hip, arms suddenly flung wide. Peterson’s thumb is locked in his other hand except when the two make small, precise box movements or pyramid shapes. He wears a green three-piece suit, the jacket lapels edged in leather. Despite their Herculean efforts and the shared, questing parts of their nature, they are plainly uncomfortable in each other’s company.

The awkward dance continues until right at the end when Brand says: “Hm! Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: we require synthesis… there needs to be necessary collusion between distinctions, but for that to happen there needs to be acknowledgement and recognition of difference: trying to achieve equality with the annihilation of category is not a successful route.”

At this point, much to both of their surprise, Peterson beams widely, points and bobs up and down in his chair saying: “Yes, that is exactly right! That’s exactly right! That is not a successful route!” Brand, clearly close to the end of his tether having had so little physical response from his guest until then, looks as puzzled as he is pleased. But it has been achieved: synthesis. Brand had packaged both their beliefs in the logic of Peterson’s language in an act of imaginative empathy.

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What marks the discussion out most is the spirit rather than the content. And here it is Brand who deserves most of the credit. Once adversarial, over-certain and needy he has retained his warmth while becoming conciliatory, interested in the other and seeking synthesis. I struggled to come up with a word better than ‘Christian’. Peterson espouses the values of Western Judeo-Christian culture; Brand actually lives them, moving out of rage and into love.

The Trickster lives in adversarial energy and has an important purpose when order becomes too overpowering. But Loki also brings about Ragnarok (the end of the Norse world) — his disruptive energies can destroy as easily as remake an ossified order. When Peterson talks to Brand you can see a new centre beginning to be formed. But it is only possible because of a change in spirit. Brand has managed this.

It is the challenge we all must meet if we’re to move beyond the current polarisation. The Joker is a necessary, dangerous wrecker of illusions. But he needs to be put to rest if a fresh synthesis between energy and order is to be achieved, and new illusions sustained.

Time and again multinationals and public companies turn out to be as happy as junior members of the Royal Family to sign up to an ideology which will come to eat them next. If anyone is in any doubt about this trend, they should look to the men’s magazine GQ – or what we should more properly describe as the former men’s magazine, GQ.

Firstly, I should declare my prejudices at the outset. Though I have never bought a copy of GQ, I have often flicked through it at the barbers as a way to avoid conversation, and have always found it aggravating in the way that aspirational lifestyle magazines generally are.

By necessity these magazines are pornography for people who don’t have much sex, who feel that looking is the second-best thing to touching. How many of GQ’s readers could ever afford the vast price-tags on the sort of clothes the magazine made it look as though every man wore? How many went to the luxury resorts that were flagged in each issue? Or owned the cars, or generally lived the sort of James Bond-wannabe lifestyle that GQ presented as the achievable ambition of any man? If these flaws were aggravating then they were also embedded. You cannot have an aspirational lifestyle magazine which does not aspire.

Then there was the “Man of the Year” nonsense, the annual jamboree in which GQ got to display its own latest version of the modern aristocracy; a catwalk of public figures who were in turn flattered to be regarded as being in the cool club. GQ was always adept at this, hiring Alastair Campbell to give it alleged gravitas, or handing an award to Russell Brand in order to look like they were on top of each pseudo-serious trend.

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In reality, of course, such episodes showed the vulnerability of these very modern day snobs, the pretence that they were style arbiters and trend-setters rather than deeply unimaginative trend-followers. The inability to take a stand on anything until the precise moment that GQ sensed that the stand was being taken by everybody else. The sucking-up to power wherever it came from. It is an editorial talent of a kind, to be so craven that you will jump on any trend as soon as you think it no longer worth resisting.

With complete inevitability, in recent times GQ has been all too happy to join the woke bandwagon. As the Western world has gone through a set of values-alterations, so GQ has had to keep its antennae exceptionally attuned so as to know where it should follow next.

And one must pity them in some ways, for a men’s magazine like GQ really has only one objective in mind: to trick men into believing that it has the secret (or at least some of the secrets) of how men can attract women. Of course the usual pretence intermittently occurs – as it does throughout GQ’s opposite numbers in the world of women’s magazines – that all of this is only for the personal self-esteem of the readers and to make them feel better inside.

In reality the business model is to pretend that the magazine has knowledge its readers need. And the pity for GQ is that its core business – the whole business of relations between the sexes – has become exceptionally fraught in recent years.

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Inevitably, GQ found a way to roll with that tide. In the year after the “MeToo” movement broke out it was necessary for them to demonstrate not only that they were totally on board with whatever the new consensus was, but that they were – if anything – positively ahead of the curve. That is why the magazine’s UK editor, Dylan Jones, last year editorialised that “For the first time in history, we’ve all been called to account for the sins of the patriarchy.” What does this surrender flag even mean? What is “the patriarchy”? What are its “sins”? Why do all men have to be called to account for them? Have I been called to account? Have you?

That increasingly beseeching, begging tone began to infuse the magazine. When Lewis Hamilton was accused of transphobia in the closing days of 2017 it was GQ which came to his rescue with a reputational repair job. As the cover star a few months later, in August 2018, Hamilton was photographed in a hideous tartan skirt. Though not forgetting to show some carefully rippled abs (for it is important for a man to still have some self-esteem while being forcibly feminised in the name of the new tolerance), the headline read “Lewis Hamilton refuses to skirt the issue”.

And now, a year later, GQ have found their latest surrender-hole. A magazine that solely exists because it pretends that it knows what masculinity is, and what women like about it, has decided instead that masculinity is a problem and that a “new masculinity” is needed.

The cover star this time is Pharrell, wearing a hideous outfit that looks like a cross between a cassock, a tent, a poncho and a dinghy – perhaps in due course it will be known as the life-raft outfit. For its aim, as with the whole pathetic mess that is this GQ issue, is to try to save men from the accusations being made about them: by promising that they have surrendered already.

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A beseeching, begging editorial by Will Welch (the new editor-in-chief) pays its indulgences straight away. He talks about the “pervasive culture of sexual intimidation and violence and blatant gender inequality”, of “victims” and the “discriminatory culture”. How should these things be addressed? Welch writes: “We see every day at GQ as an opportunity to answer that question,” continuing “one way we’ve addressed it is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.” Which is one hell of a change of mission statement for a men’s magazine.

Inside, readers of this former men’s magazine can find advice from, for instance, someone called Hannah Gadsby, telling men why they “should be more ladylike”, and “interrogate” themselves as to why they might not want to be. Of course the ideal would be if everybody could be allowed to be themselves, whatever that self may be. But just as it is tedious and restrictive to assume that all men should behave one way and all women another, so it is equally – in fact more – ridiculous to insist that men should act more like women and all women perhaps more like men.

Sensible people will simply ignore GQ’s advice, realising that although women want many things, what they want least of all are the ex-men that GQ has now dedicated itself to creating. The magazine always relied on stereotypes, but at least they used to be amusingly aspirational. Nobody will aspire to the its ideals now, and soon perhaps GQ will learn the mantra that Gillette and others learned before them: get woke, go broke.