The Russell Brand media tour has proved one thing beyond doubt

Brand didn’t invent this archetype, but he industrialised this specific flavour of pseudo-intellectual performance. For a generation of young men, he made it seem that this was a viable alternative to traditional laddishness: that you didn’t need to be on the rugby team to get girls if you could quote a bit of Nietzsche badly and wore your mother’s pearls.

I remember seeing him growing up — on panel shows, interviewing politicians, cropping up in magazines as some kind of unlikely sex symbol — and never quite understanding the appeal. His politics sounded like the sort of thing a sixth former says when they haven’t done the reading but still want to dominate the discussion. And I certainly thought there was nothing less sexy than a man who looked like he didn’t shower and communicated solely through phrases that would sound cringe at even the worst spoken-word poetry events.

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I was not at all surprised to see that his new book How to Become a Christian in 7 Days has been labelled “unreadable” by the New Statesman, and that the prose style is, according to Unherd, “so unbearable it eclipses every other consideration”.

If you then, like me, tuned in to watch his unedited interview with Piers Morgan, you were probably even less surprised that nothing of substance really came out of it.

It is shocking in theory, that a man in Brand’s position should be embarking on a media tour. But it is entirely consistent.  Brand admits he has been addicted to many things, none more so than attention. 

He practically invented the formula of: say something controversial, chuck in a wink, and pass it off as roguish charm, that paved the way for the manosphere, something that he himself admitted in the Morgan interview. It’s the same basic model – insecure men making content for other insecure men, all of them projecting confidence, virility, and some kind of insider knowledge about how the world really works. (They don’t.)

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The difference is, at least with the Andrew Tate types of the world, you can spot it immediately. Too-tight T-shirts, shouty podcasts, fake Rolexes – and it takes about three seconds before something deeply misogynistic falls out of their mouth. There’s no subtlety to it.

Brand’s version is slipperier. The men who model themselves on him don’t look like grifters in the same obvious way — they’re the “tortured thinker”, the gap-year mystic, the experimental hippie with a thesaurus. Marina Hyde once described Brand as an “amulet salesman”, which feels about right.

But I digress. The Morgan interview largely consisted of Brand taking 15 minutes to answer questions by going off on long, meandering non sequiturs. If you didn’t watch the interview though, or couldn’t stomach the narcissistic pretentiousness long enough to get through it, you’ve probably seen its most viral moment.

When asked to quote the Bible verse that he carried during his February court appearance, Brand spent a full two minutes fruitlessly searching for it, in silence, – all of which was broadcast, due to his prior insistence that the show not be edited. Ha ha ha.

The internet, reliably, did what it does best and turned it into a meme within hours — “how it feels looking through the wine menu when you know you’re just going to order the house red”, and so on.

During the whole excruciating scene, Morgan keeps glancing straight down the camera like he is in The Office. Afterwards, he revealed that Brand had insisted on a pre-interview prayer – and also said that he had “Never had a guest be so inappropriately tactile during an interview, which surprised [Morgan] given the allegations against [Brand].” 

In one of the only genuinely satisfying moments, Morgan calls him what a lot of people have been thinking for years: a grifter. A chameleon who peddles whatever will guarantee them success.

When Brand was baptised in the Thames, barely six months after the joint investigation by The Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4 laid out the series of sexual assault allegations that he denies, plenty of people raised an eyebrow. They will be raised again now, the first time this newly public faith has been put under even mild pressure, he has proved unable to produce a single line from the book he claims has saved him.

Brand was a grifter before we even had a word for it. After Sachsgate and a Hollywood career that had started to stall by the early 2010s, he re-emerged as a kind of anti-establishment commentator — launching a web series called The Trews, railing against corporate power, austerity, media elites, the lot. It was all very “wake up, sheeple”.

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Now the grift — and the audience — has shifted. The anti-elite rhetoric is still there, but it sits far more comfortably alongside figures and platforms it once would have targeted. 

Fifteen years ago, Brand would have been on The Trews railing against the elites of American conservatism – and I’m sure would have had many an opinion on, for example, the Epstein files – but now he appears quite at home sharing their ideological spaces.

He says he has an obsession with the truth — and has long made a point of speaking “candidly” about his past, from drug abuse to his sexual history. In the interview with Piers Morgan, he admitted to sleeping with a 16-year-old when he was 30, calling it “morally and spiritually wrong” while noting it was legal, and even suggested his memory might be unreliable due to years of drug use — all while maintaining his denial of criminal wrongdoing.

But Brand’s version of “truth” has always followed the same formula: say something shocking, dress it up in faux-intellectual language, and present it as something profound. And he’s doing it again now. The confessions, the salacious detail, the willingness to air it all in public – which I would wager has less to do with contrition and spiritual rebirth, but with yet more excuses to talk about himself.

And that, really, is the constant. Every version of Russell Brand — libertine, activist, guru, convert — revolves around the same obsession. Himself. And so it’s no surprise then, that he has announced he is running for London Mayor – something that seems to have become a trendy hobby for right wing grifters who want even more attention (cough cough, Laurence Fox).

In one of the few moments of actual clarity in the interview, Brand describes himself — and Piers Morgan — as cockroaches. Creatures that can survive even a nuclear blast. And make no mistake, he means it as a compliment.

Because that’s the trick, really. The endless chances we in the media give him – even if the coverage is one of a disapproving tone – all just results in more of him. 

If there is anything that would actually hurt Russell Brand, it would be to ignore him. For someone whose entire currency is attention, the only thing that really devalues him is taking it away.