Lucy Powell on Times Radio this morning:
“I think Russell Brand has been a public figure for 20 years. And I’m sure like many, many other people, had I, Ed Miliband or anybody else known to then what we know today, of course, history would have been very, very different. And he wouldn’t have been given the platforms that he was.
[…]
I think that everybody now, knowing what they know, would take a very different and dim view of that had any of those things been understood widely at the time, which they weren’t. So we weren’t in the social media age then where these sorts of allegations were maybe around a bit but not really well known…”
‘Maybe around a bit’…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”