CRAIG BROWN: Tony Blair’s spin doctor once waxed lyrical about Russell Brand, so… A penny for your thoughts now, Alastair Campbell
Years ago, Alastair Campbell – ‘communicator, writer, strategist’, as he calls himself on his website – wrote about his burgeoning friendship with Russell Brand.
He recalled in 2015 how he first became aware of the comedian when he and Brand lived in the same neighbourhood in London.
‘He then moved away,’ Campbell continued, ‘but came back into our lives when, at a time he was getting big and the Press were starting to turn him into a Public Enemy, a mutual friend called me and asked if I would see him to discuss how to deal with newspapers which are hellbent on hate and destruction. Readily I did so …’
Campbell advised Brand to follow his example and ignore the newspapers: ‘Once I stopped giving a damn what they said, it was liberating.’
He also visited Brand in his new home in East London, noting ‘it is a lot funkier than the NW3 place’ where he used to live.
The two of them discussed politics. In his 2014 book Revolution, Brand recalled that ‘I met Alastair Campbell the other day and he’s a lovely bloke who likes football, cares about people, tries to do the right thing and still justifies that inexcusable war…
Years ago, Alastair Campbell — ‘communicator, writer, strategist’, as he calls himself on his website — wrote about his burgeoning friendship with Russell Brand
The two of them discussed politics. In his 2014 book Revolution, Brand recalled that ‘I met Alastair Campbell the other day and he’s a lovely bloke’
‘I said to him, ‘Alastair, what did you do that war for?’ He remarkably, and with a straight face, tied it into 9/11 (you remember, those towers; there were two of ’em, I think).’
Brand then references the claim that ‘the World Trade Center collapsed in a way that some people say looked like a controlled demolition’.
But the two men got on well. ‘I saw grace in him,’ concluded Brand. In turn, Campbell praised Brand as ‘someone with a very good sense of who he is, what he wants to achieve, and how’.
Yet Brand’s Revolution was quite clearly a wordy mish-mash of ramblings, more suited to a precocious 15-year-old.
‘The significance of consciousness itself as a participant in what we perceive as reality is increasingly negating what we understood to be objectivity’ ran a typical sentence. No one seemed to notice that Brand was actually a middle-aged man of 39.
READ MORE: Met cops probe sex assault claim against Russell Brand as woman comes forward to report 2003 Soho attack – as star’s ‘Bipolarisation’ tour is postponed
Brand undercut his political opinions with sick jokes about rape and violence. Calling for an end to ‘corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility and economic inequality’, he added ‘we can no longer remain pallid and listless like Fritzl’s kids’. This was a flippant reference to Josef Fritzl, who repeatedly raped his daughter and held her captive for 24 years, along with the seven children to whom she gave birth.
Brand also compared the Kyoto international agreement on carbon emissions to ‘giving Fred West a detention’.
But Campbell, like many in the media, was happy to ignore these signs: ‘Out on the speaking circuit, I have found myself mentioning Brand fairly often, saying I think he is wrong ever to advocate opting out of the democratic process, but right on a lot that he says about what politics and business have become… what I saw was someone who had certain strong principles and fixed views, but around them was fascinated by the views of others.’
Russell Brand pictured during the 2006 Loaded Lafta Comedy Awards at Sketch in London
They bonded once more when Brand invited Campbell onto his online broadcast, The Trews. After the recording, Campbell advised Brand on how to persuade party leaders to talk to him in the run-up to the 2015 general election, ‘and I for one was glad when I heard Ed Miliband had said yes… what Russell Brand says and does matters more than what the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph, the Star and the Express are going to say on Election Day’.
The Brand/Miliband interview went ahead a week before the general election. Brand concluded: ‘I completely agree with you, Ed… People want security and stability and an end to this fear.’
The interview’s impact on voters was negligible: the Conservatives went on to win the election with 306 seats to Labour’s 258.
So perhaps the moral of this story is that the pursuit of the trendy can transform even the most hard-headed strategist into a gullible fool.
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