Xlibris1

Here's my @Telegraph column, 'No Lucy Powell, we all knew Brand was toxic in 2015' telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/11… The appointment of Lucy Powell as Education Secretary by Andy Burnham managed the near-impossible in making Bridget Phillipson seem missed. Powell is not only wrong about almost everything in her own department; she also manages to be wrong about everything else. And, as in her comments on Tuesday about Russell Brand, often grotesquely wrong. Powell has defended then Labour leader Ed Miliband’s appearance on Brand’s YouTube interview show in 2015 by asserting: “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.” Leave aside the idiotic suggestion that social media was insignificant in 2015, Powell’s defence of Miliband rests on a warping of history that is so outrageous it is a new low even for her. One of the biggest news stories of 2008 was Brand’s suspension by the BBCafter leaving a series of revolting sexual messages on the answerphone of the actor Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter. He had already been sacked by radio station XFM for reading out pornography on air. You would have had to be living in a cave not to know about this. Then in 2013, in a broadcast interview, Brand “joked” about raping a woman and then murdering her: “I raped someone once,” he said, to laughter from the audience. He went on: “I killed her after.” In his 2010 memoir he wrote that he had spat in the face of a prostitute: “What kind of man was I? Treating women in this way? If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?” Brand had not, of course, been convicted of sexual assault or rape, but he was widely seen as toxic and as he sought to reinvent himself as a political guru – the reinvention that Miliband sought to take advantage of by appearing on his show – there were any number of pieces and social media posts (yes, social media, Ms Powell) that pointed out Brand’s pride in his misogyny. Powell’s assertion that no one knew what Brand was like is a form of attempted gaslighting – a pathetic, impossible, stupid form of it, but attempted nonetheless, seeking to pretend that something that was near-universally known was unknown. Then again, Powell has a history of grotesque comments. Last May, she appeared on Any Questions, days after a Channel 4 documentary on grooming gangs. Asked by a fellow panellist whether she had seen it, she replied: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now do we?” and then: “Let’s get that dog whistle out shall we?” Powell also claimed that the Manchester Arena suicide bombing which killed 22 people had nothing to do with Islam. After the murders, she was asked by the BBC: “How serious is the problem of Islamist radicalisation in Manchester?” She replied: “I’m not sure that this is the right moment to totally go into that, because I don’t even want to ascribe what has happened to the Islam faith.” She also denied the clear evidence of links between the bomber, Islamist radicalism and some mosques, telling the Manchester Evening News: “I’m particularly worried about that kind of narrative that somehow there’s areas or hotspots of Manchester that are hotbeds of radicalisation.” Powell’s defence of Miliband’s appearance with Russell Brand is revolting. But it is entirely, as it were, on brand for her.

This is a variant of my contention that stupidity is the least understood but one of the most important factors in politics. Powell gets away with a lot in interviews because of it. For one thing, it was a huge news story when Brand was suspended by the BBC in 2008 over his treatment of Georgina Baillie. He was regarded as toxic by many people by then. The idea no one knew what he was like generally, even if the sexual assault and rape proclivities weren't known, is ludicrous.