When should a politician apologise for “cosying up” to someone who has since been convicted of sexual offences? When they’re on the other side of the political spectrum, of course.
According to Nigel Farage, Labour should apologise for “cosying up” to Russell Brand more than a decade ago, when the comedian was known only to have a very bad attitude towards women, rather than for anything criminal.
But the Reform leader was himself spending time with Brand on his podcast back in 2024, nine months after police began investigating the comedian over allegations of sexual assault (but before he was charged). Farage has said he “regrets” joining Brand on that show, that “his thoughts are with the victims who have suffered immensely”, and that it wasn’t a planned interview but an impromptu appearance.
Perhaps the difference here was that Farage didn’t see himself as being cosy with Brand. In 2015, Ed Miliband was actively seeking his endorsement, rather than being a guest on his podcast. Perhaps it was that in the intervening decade, Brand went on quite the journey from revolutionary darling of the left who, according to Farage in 2014, “didn’t seem to utter a word of sense” to alt-right conspiracy theorist.
In 2023, the year before he appeared on Brand’s podcast, Farage suggested on GB News that Brand was in the firing line because he has upset “very powerful people”. Even since the verdict, Farage has said the case was “very difficult isn’t it, because this is two decades old, it’s ‘he said, she said’, although there’s more than one she. So these cases are always very difficult for us to judge at a distance because there is no actual hard evidence.”
Either way, how Westminster has dealt with the fallout from Brand’s conviction for rape and three counts of sexual assault has said a lot about how sexual violence is viewed in the political world. It is not just that it is not really taken seriously unless it can be used to undermine an opponent. It is also that predatory and misogynistic behaviour is so normal that it doesn’t stand out as something to avoid.
Miliband has been careful to say how horrified he is by Brand’s crimes, and those around him who pushed for the then Labour leader to do his interview with the comedian back in 2015 have insisted that they didn’t know of the accusations that led to his conviction this week. They merely saw him as a popular way to reach disillusioned young people who he had previously been telling it wasn’t worth voting.
“In political cultures where there is so much misogyny, everyone forgets to push back against what has become terrifyingly, poisonously normal”
But Brand had already been embroiled in furores over his behaviour towards women, including his calls to Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter. He had already revealed in his 2005 autobiography that he had written a “victims list – a litany of the women I’ve wronged as a result of my sexual addiction”, which made him “feel like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds”. That behaviour should have stood out as unacceptable, as the mark of someone whose good opinion a politician on either side of the spectrum shouldn’t want.
But it didn’t. And the reason it didn’t was that it was – and still is – far too normal, both in the worlds of entertainment and politics. Miliband and Farage and every other leading politician in the UK have had to work with people who have faced allegations of sexual misconduct. One of them is the president of the United States, who boasted openly about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and calls women journalists “Piggy”, “stupid” and “ugly”.
Some of their opponents have argued that Trump’s alleged behaviour means these men shouldn’t talk to him, but the reality is that they have to. But when you have to work with people who are openly misogynistic, it shifts your window of what is normal, forces you to stomach things you would ideally express revulsion at, and stops you noticing other things that should also be abnormal.
There are plenty of predators who operate in plain sight in entertainment and in Westminster. Natural justice demands that those people should face consequences only if they are really proven guilty of something, but once again the critical mass of bad behaviour that has to be stomached makes it easier for them to operate for longer.
A truthful response from politicians who really wanted to push back against the culture that still exists in their world would be to say that the thing they regret the most is not one particular interview or podcast or photo. It is that they couldn’t see how abnormal and unacceptable that person’s behaviour should have appeared to them. That within the morass of Westminster, Brand didn’t stand out. Most of the complaints about Miliband appearing with him related to his advocacy of not voting and his general coarseness, rather than specific worries about his treatment of women, and that shows how very normalised his behaviour was for everyone.
Normalisation is one of the most insidious forces in public life. It is when through necessity people decide to approach something that they know should be unacceptable or shocking as though it is quite within the realms of normality. We see it in police officers who have seen so many dead bodies and have had so little time to decompress that they start joking and taking photos of the next dead person they see. We see it in hospitals where short staffing has become so normal that nurses become immune to the sound of pain, thinking it normal.
And we see it in political cultures where there is so much misogyny expressed by people who everyone still has to work with that everyone forgets to push back against something that has become terrifyingly, poisonously normal. Merely regretting an association with Russell Brand won’t change that, either. It would take an enormous and brave shift in perspective.
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