I never got caught up in the Russell Brand cult. He had an act that worked for him and he was sometimes entertaining but that was about it. He was no more than less than that. But as Brendan O’Neill points out in a brilliant deconstruction of the sort of people who lionised Russell Brand he was a charlatan who attracted at first washed up middle class lefties and then those on the more ‘out there’ and cringeworthy bits of the political Right with his sudden ‘conversion’ to Christianity.

Russell Brand has now been convicted of sex offences and I suspect that he’s going to spend a lot of time in gaol because of them.

Mr O’Neill said of those who flocked to support and pander to Brand and the cult that was built up around Brand

The Cult of Brand really was insane. The midwits and lightweights of both left and right built an altar to this one-trick carnival act. They mistook theatrical eccentricity for revolutionary fire, and verbosity for genius. No, none of these people bear any responsibility for the crimes he committed. But they did buff his ego. They did flatter his manic eccentricity. The Brand circus was hard proof that there is none as gullible as the elites. They saw a guru who would lead Britain to revolution or America to Christ, where the rest of us just saw a twat and a predator.

I must admit that looking from the outside I didn’t see him at first as a predator, at least according to his public image. A man in such a position of fame, wealth and adulation as Brand was in for a while would not in my view need to be a predator, he would have been, to put it in British colloquial terms, ‘an absolute fanny magnet’. In other words there were probably hundreds of women who would have voluntarily been intimate with Brand if just for the reason of being able to boast that they had been so. But Brand clearly was not satisfied with that, he had to push the boundaries of consent and got found out and is going to be punished for it.

People surrounding Brand pandered to his every whim, hung on to his every word and garlanded him with laurels that he didn’t deserve. Never telling a person ‘no’ doesn’t exactly make for balanced and non-predatory people. It’s the sort of thing that could turn almost anyone’s head. Nobody around Brand told him no, there was no equivalent of the Memento Mori, a slave who followed triumphal Roman Emperors around reminding them that they were mortal. Russell Brand has revealed himself to be a man with predatory instincts a man willing to cross consent thresholds, but he may have been in less of a position to exercise those instincts if he had been less mindlessly adored by those who should have known better.

Link

Brendan O’Neill on Russel Brand conviction

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/11/05/good-riddance-to-the-insane-cult-of-russell-brand/