Today’s Guardian finds it astonishing that Russell Brand, convicted of one count of rape and three sexual assaults yesterday, was “embraced as a serious social commentator” when he returned to Britain in 2013. Embraced by whom, Guido wonders...
The paper gives its own role in promoting brand Brand one single line, noting he had already written columns for it. Yesterday’s big Guardian piece on TV insiders said “Brand’s case has led to difficult questions for the BBC, Channel 4 and the production companies that worked with him.” Hilarious…
On an unrelated note Russell Brand’s 137 written contributions to the Guardian are still online – 17 of which are after 2013 and which concluded in February 2015. Long after the Andrew Sachs voicemails, the paper ran his opinion on Thatcher the day after she died, ran a GQ awards column over a sizeable chunk of the front page in September 2013, and ran a column blaming Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death on “extremely stupid drug laws.” Not to mention the fawning praise from Owen Jones and the entire Labour establishment, including the now-Prime Minister…
Today’s piece also sniffs that critics lavished praise on his memoir, quoting its tale of Brand trailing a classmate 200 miles to Wigan as an early warning sign. That particular book was serialised in… the Guardian…
In October 2014 the paper put on a ticketed Guardian Live event, with Owen Jones interviewing Brand. It was broadcast live from the Emmanuel Centre. That day Jones penned a piece in the paper attacking the “all-too-smug, seen-it-all-before snottiness” aimed at Brand. Two months later George Monbiot named him a hero of 2014, calling him “the best thing that has happened to the left in years”. George?
Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor from 1995 to 2015, claimed in Prospect Magazine in 2023: “I only met him once, when he was writing a popular football column for the Guardian, along with the occasional commentary piece.“ Funny, seeing as the football column was pre-2010 and the above photo of them snugly on the sofa together was from the Guardian’s morning conference in August 2013…
