PIETY, PROSECUTION AND PERFECT TIMING

The sudden eruption of piety in the life of Russell Brand has provided the rest of us with a spectacle of such exquisite timing that one almost suspects divine intervention, if only of the theatrical variety. Until quite recently, Brand was content to inhabit the role of the professional reprobate: a man whose public persona consisted largely of the enthusiastic pursuit of substances, sexual variety and the kind of verbal excess that suggested he had never met a boundary he did not wish to test. The authorities, the media and a good portion of the public appeared content to treat this as a form of performance art, or at least as the inevitable cost of celebrity. 

Decades of this behaviour produced little more than the occasional raised eyebrow and a shelf of confessional volumes. Then, somewhere around 2024, Brand discovered Christ. The conversion was announced with the same exuberance once reserved for less spiritual enthusiasms. Baptism followed. Public declarations of faith multiplied. A certain portion of the internet, previously indifferent or amused, began to listen with something approaching respect.

And then the law arrived.

The conviction, delivered on the fifth of November 2026 at Southwark Crown Court, concerned events that had occurred between 2004 and 2009. One count of rape and three of sexual assault. The jury, after due deliberation, found against him on those matters while clearing him of others. A substantial custodial sentence now looms. The timing, of course, is everything. Lauren Witzke, surveying the wreckage from her own particular vantage point, has concluded that the real offence was not the historical conduct but the subsequent spiritual reorientation. Had Brand remained a cheerfully degenerate celebrity, she suggests, the machinery of justice would have continued to sleep. It was only when he became effective, charismatic and, worse still, beloved by a different constituency that the decision was taken to make an example of him. The top article covering the verdict even managed to mock the faith itself, which she finds deeply disturbing. She hopes the Trump Administration might intervene, a plea that rather neatly reveals the geopolitical scale on which some people now view a British criminal trial.

One must, of course, question the motives of everyone involved, beginning with Brand himself. Conversion is always a mysterious business, and when it arrives after a career spent demonstrating the opposite values, the sceptic is entitled to ask whether the road to Damascus ran through a particularly unfavourable set of headlines. Genuine spiritual awakening is possible; so is the calculation that a public embrace of Christianity might purchase a measure of forgiveness, or at least a new audience. Brand has been both things at different times: the man who made a brand of his own excesses, and the man now presenting himself as redeemed. The two positions are not necessarily incompatible, but they do invite the suspicion that the second may have been influenced by the impending difficulties of the first.

The prosecutors and the complainants occupy a different moral territory. The allegations concerned events long past. Delayed justice is still justice, and the fact that the complainant’s stories finally reached a courtroom after Brand’s religious turn does not, by itself, prove conspiracy. Yet the coincidence is inconvenient for those who prefer their narratives tidy. One can believe the women without believing that the timing of the trial was entirely free of cultural weather. The climate had changed. Brand was no longer merely a louche entertainer; he had become a figure who spoke, with increasing confidence, to audiences suspicious of institutions. That alteration in status does not invent the past, but it may have accelerated the willingness of institutions to revisit it.

Then there is the media, which has never been accused of excessive subtlety when a fallen celebrity is available. The article that so offended Witzke managed to describe Brand as a “born-again Christian rapist” with a flourish of sanctimony that would have made a Victorian moralist blush. The phrase does useful work: it simultaneously registers the conviction and sneers at the faith. One is left wondering whether the contempt is directed more at the crime or at the inconvenient fact that the criminal now claims to have found God. Journalists who spent years treating Brand’s earlier excesses as colourful copy now discover a sudden appetite for moral seriousness. The appetite is selective. Motives, once again, are not pure.

Witzke’s own intervention is not free of interest. Her analysis is clear: the real sin was effectiveness in the service of Christ. The claim has the advantage of simplicity. It also has the disadvantage of treating the historical allegations as secondary, almost incidental. To defend Brand on the ground that he was left alone while degenerate and pursued only once he became pious is to imply that the earlier conduct was somehow less serious when it was merely entertaining. That is a difficult position to sustain without appearing to grade the seriousness of the offences according to the political or religious utility of the offender. One suspects that if Brand had converted to a less fashionable creed, or to none at all, the same events might have produced a different set of defenders.

The public, meanwhile, divides along familiar lines. Some see a predator finally held to account. Others see a man punished for the crime of becoming useful to the wrong side. Both camps contain people whose motives are mixed. There are those who care about the victims and those who care about the narrative. There are those who care about due process and those who care about the opportunity to score points. The Brand case has the misfortune of occurring at a moment when almost every public event is immediately conscripted into larger culture-war formations. A British jury’s verdict becomes, within hours, evidence of either institutional capture or righteous reckoning, depending on the observer’s prior commitments.

What remains is the awkward residue of fact. Brand was found guilty of serious offences committed long before any conversion. The conversion itself may be sincere, opportunistic, or some combination of the two; the human heart is not obliged to choose only one. The media’s tone has been, in places, unpleasantly triumphant. The political suggestions that a foreign administration might usefully intervene in a domestic criminal matter are, at best, optimistic. And the claim that Brand would have been left undisturbed had he continued in his earlier mode of life is an assertion that cannot be tested, only asserted.

One further suspicion attaches itself, with a certain inevitable persistence, to the content of Brand’s YouTube channel. There, for some years, he has been in the business of inviting his substantial audience to treat the prevailing political narrative with something less than automatic reverence. The invitation has not gone unnoticed. It is therefore tempting, for those already disposed to see patterns rather than coincidences, to conclude that the historical allegations were revived and prosecuted with unusual energy precisely because a dissenting voice of that reach had become inconvenient. 

The channel, in this reading, was not merely a platform; it was a nuisance that required removal, and the courtroom provided the most efficient method. Whether the prosecutors, the complainants or the broader institutional apparatus ever sat down and articulated the matter in quite those terms is another question. Motives of this kind rarely announce themselves so clearly. Yet the suspicion lingers, as suspicions of this sort tend to do, that the timing of justice may have been assisted by the sudden usefulness of silencing a man who had taken to asking awkward questions in public.

In the end, the affair offers less a clean moral lesson than a demonstration of how quickly motives become contested once a public figure changes tribes. Brand’s earlier life supplied ample material for those who wished to see him as a cautionary tale of excess. His later life supplies material for those who wish to see him as a martyr to faith. Both interpretations require a certain selective blindness. The courts, for their part, have delivered a verdict according to the evidence presented. Whether that verdict will satisfy anyone for long is another matter. 

In the meantime, the rest of us are left to watch a man who once specialised in the performance of liberation now performing the consequences of having been taken at his word, while various observers quarrel over which version of him was the more authentic, and which set of motives, finally, deserves the greater suspicion.

THE SLOPULIST COLLAPSE

The 2026 midterms have delivered their usual American spectacle: a great deal of noise, a certain amount of blood on the carpet, and the enduring impression that the electorate has once again chosen the least imaginative way of not quite solving its problems. One watches the results roll in with the same mild despair one feels when a gifted but chronically under-rehearsed orchestra somehow manages to play the wrong symphony. The right-wing nationalists, those self-appointed saviours of the Western tradition, have been given a golden opportunity by the extreme left’s latest experiments in social engineering, economic vandalism and moral exhibitionism. And what have they done with it? They have, with characteristic aplomb, dropped the ball, tripped over it, and then blamed the ball for being insufficiently patriotic.

Look around. In Hungary, Orbán lost. In Brazil, Bolsonaro has been defeated by an eighty-one-year-old socialist, a development that suggests the voters preferred the familiar comforts of geriatric Marxism to whatever vigorous alternative was on offer. In Britain, Labour now leads Reform by ten points in the polls, a margin that would be impressive if it did not also imply that the public has decided the cure for one set of mediocrities is simply a different set. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has lost a third of his vote share. And in the United States, the midterms have produced what can only be described as a wipeout for the populist right. Everywhere one looks, the “slopulist” tendency – that curious blend of slogans, resentment and carefully curated nostalgia – is taking a thorough drubbing.

One might have expected better. The extreme left has been generous to a fault in providing material. There have been the usual excesses: the ideological purity tests, the economic theories that treat inflation as a moral virtue, the cultural experiments that treat ordinary human instincts as something to be regulated out of existence. A competent nationalist movement, armed with a coherent vision and a few sentences that young people might actually want to hear, should have been able to turn this into electoral gold. Instead, the offering has been depressingly consistent: protect the pensions and property prices of the already comfortable, mutter darkly about the left and mass immigration, and hope that fear will do the rest of the work. FTear, it turns out, is a finite resource. When it fails to hold back either the left or the immigration, one is left with the uncomfortable realisation that one had nothing else in the arsenal.

There are exceptions, of course, which only make the general failure more irritating. The AfD, for instance, responded to the latest geopolitical farce – the Iran business and the Greenland nonsense – by the radical expedient of reasserting German sovereignty. Meanwhile, elsewhere, one observed the spectacle of Farage politely requesting that his own government allow American forces the use of British bases for what some were calling, with a straight face, the Purim war. The contrast is instructive. One party remembers that nations are supposed to act in their own interest. The other appears to believe that the highest form of patriotism is to facilitate someone else’s.

The problem runs deeper than individual personalities. For years the right has selected for vapid, fame-hungry influencers and mindless shills with the same enthusiasm that a failing theatre company selects for actors who look good in the photographs. The average right-winger’s brain has been so thoroughly marinated in conspiratorialism that coherent thought has become something of a luxury item. The result is a movement that can generate heat but not light, noise but not argument, and endless content but almost no contentment among the young, who might otherwise have been receptive. Young people, after all, are not primarily interested in defending the equity of their grandparents’ bungalows. They would like some prospect of a future that does not consist solely of managing decline with better branding.

What is required, if one is feeling generous enough to offer advice, is something closer to what the left achieved in the 1960s: a takeover by young radicals prepared to rebuild the intellectual foundations rather than merely repaint the existing façade. Whether the human capital exists for such an enterprise remains an open and slightly depressing question. The establishment right’s vision has already lost; that much is clear from the results. The question is whether anything more interesting is waiting in the wings, or whether we are condemned to watch the same under-rehearsed orchestra play the same wrong symphony for another generation, while the extreme left continues to supply the most perfect possible material for a competent opposition, and the electorate continues, with weary consistency, to decline the opportunity to escape socialism in favour of something that at least pretends to have a plan.

It is enough to make one despair of democracy, or at least of the current personnel. One had hoped for better. One always does.

THE SHAME OF UKRAINE

The spectacle currently unfolding in Ukraine has all the moral clarity of a three-card trick performed under a flickering streetlamp by a man who keeps insisting he is a magician of the purest integrity. One is invited to stare at the glittering promise of democracy, rule of law and civilisation while the real action happens somewhere off to the side, in a private house on the outskirts of Kyiv where men in uniform appear to have been improvising their own version of due process. A fourteen-year-old boy emerges wrapped in a blanket, eyes wide with the particular astonishment of someone who has just discovered that the adults in the room have been playing a rather different game from the one advertised on television. The local unit of the Azov corps, we are solemnly informed, was merely running a temporary deployment facility. Temporary, one assumes, in the same sense that a black hole is temporary: it swallows what is fed into it and does not trouble itself with exit strategies.

This is the moment, of course, when the Western chorus is supposed to clear its throat and explain that the whole business is Russian propaganda, or an isolated incident, or the regrettable but inevitable by-product of a just war against the forces of darkness. The same voices that once dissected every alleged Russian atrocity with forensic relish now discover an almost monastic capacity for silence. Ursula von der Leyen, that tireless lecturer on European values, is nowhere to be found. Emmanuel Macron, ever ready with a vision of strategic autonomy, has likewise taken an extended leave of absence from the subject. The moral accounting, it seems, is suspended the moment the victims are Ukrainian and the perpetrators wear the approved insignia.

One might almost admire the consistency if it were not so thoroughly self-serving. For years the same people have lectured us on the necessity of supporting Ukraine without qualification, as though critical thought itself had been declared a form of collaboration. The invasion of February 2022 is treated as Year Zero, a clean break after which history began and all previous complications were rendered irrelevant. Never mind the 2008 Bucharest summit and its casual promise of NATO membership. Never mind Maidan, the Donbass, the Minsk agreements left to wither on the vine, or three decades of eastward expansion that Moscow had, with tedious regularity, described as a red line. To notice any of this is to be accused of moral relativism, as if recognising complexity were the same thing as endorsing tanks rolling across borders. It is not. It is simply the refusal to accept that the universe operates according to the narrative conventions of a Marvel film.

Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, that Vladimir Putin carries the overwhelming share of responsibility for the catastrophe, the question remains: who benefits from its indefinite prolongation? A war without end is an emergency without end. Billions circulate with the transparency of a Swiss bank account held in the name of a shell company. Leaders who no longer face serious electoral scrutiny discover that the moral high ground is an excellent place from which to issue demands while remaining immune to reciprocal examination. In this climate, the man who has most skilfully positioned himself as the indispensable face of resistance is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

There is a particular species of political actor who thrives in the gap between rhetoric and reality. Zelenskyy has perfected the art. He tours Western capitals with the practised urgency of a man who knows that the next tranche of funding depends on the next carefully staged appearance of resolve. Meanwhile, at home, the machinery of mobilisation grinds on with a brutality that would have drawn howls of outrage had it been occurring in any other country. Desertion is treated less as a human response to impossible conditions than as a disciplinary problem to be solved in private houses with the lights kept low. Elections are postponed indefinitely, the better to preserve national unity, which is the traditional euphemism for preserving the current arrangement of power. Corruption scandals surface and are absorbed with the practised shrug of an administration that has learned how useful a permanent state of emergency can be.

To call this man a war criminal is not to claim moral equivalence with those who launched the invasion. It is to observe that the systematic coercion of one’s own population, the toleration of extrajudicial detention and the conversion of a national tragedy into a personal brand all sit uncomfortably with the language of democratic virtue he so freely deploys. The same Western elites who can barely contain their contempt for bureaucratic overreach, institutional capture and the casual disregard for public consent within their own borders become models of deference the moment the subject turns to Kyiv. They see the system clearly enough when it inconveniences them; they develop a sudden, convenient blindness when it is dressed in the colours of a preferred cause.

The boy in the blanket is not an aberration. He is a symptom. He is what happens when a narrative hardens into dogma and the people managing the dogma discover that scrutiny is optional. Demand independent investigation and one is told one is playing into the enemy’s hands. Demand elections and one is accused of undermining the war effort. Demand that the same standards applied to Russia be applied, however unevenly, to Ukraine and one is informed that the situation is too serious for such pedantry. The seriousness, of course, is precisely why the pedantry is required.

George Orwell once observed that the trouble with most political language is that it is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. The current discourse around Ukraine has refined the technique to an almost industrial standard. The lies are not always outright fabrications; they are more often strategic omissions, selective outrage and the careful curation of which faces are allowed to appear on the evening news. The result is a public conversation so carefully managed that a fourteen-year-old emerging from an Azov facility can be treated as an inconvenience rather than a warning.

The only coherent response is to insist on the obvious. Accountability is not a luxury to be postponed until victory. Elections are not a reward for good behaviour but the minimum condition of legitimate government. Leaders who have grown comfortable with emergency powers should be required to seek a fresh mandate rather than treat the continuation of conflict as a form of personal tenure. And the man who has most thoroughly embodied the gap between the rhetoric of civilisation and the practice of coercion should not be shielded from the same moral vocabulary so freely applied to his opponents. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has presided over a system that has, by its own admission, produced facilities of the sort that spat out a traumatised child into the night. That is not the record of a pure defender of democratic values. It is the record of a war criminal of a particularly modern and media-savvy variety: one who understands that the camera prefers a certain kind of heroism and is prepared to supply it, while the less photogenic realities are handled off-stage.

The irony is almost too neat. Those who spend their days denouncing the democratic deficits of European institutions become models of uncritical loyalty the moment the same methods are deployed in a cause they have chosen to sacralise. They have not changed their nature. They have merely changed the border. The rest of us are left to connect the dots that the official narrative prefers to leave scattered.