The Mail’s sick and dishonest attempt to discredit the left over Russell Brand

“Labour recruited him to the cause during its doomed 2015 election campaign under Mr Miliband as he chased the young vote.”

And inside the paper, under the gleeful headline “From Burnham to Miliband, how the Left prostrated themselves before Brand the seedy Messiah”, Whitehall editor Claire Ellicott added: “In 2014, Mr Burnham, then shadow health secretary, tweeted his support for Brand and praised him for using his celebrity status ‘to help others’.

Suggested Reading

The decline of the Daily Mail

James Ball

“The Guardian, meanwhile, asked: ‘Could Russell Brand win it for Labour?’, while their columnist Owen Jones wrote that ‘Russell Brand matters’.”

Yet unsurprisingly there was little room in the Mail to discuss Brand’s more recent closeness to figures on the right – who prostrated themselves in front of the seedy messiah even as he was due in court.

On September 29, less than six weeks before Brand found himself behind prison walls, he was in decidedly more salubrious surroundings – on stage in Washington DC at US health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Summit. He later posed for a photo with Kennedy himself, as he has done with MAGA luminaries like Donald Trump Jnr, JD Vance and the now-estranged podcast weirdo Tucker Carlson.

Onstage, Brand briefly hugged a female panellist, adding: “She initiated that contact, I shall make clear.”

Long after the allegations against him became public knowledge, Brand was at the 2024 Republican convention that presaged Trump’s second presidency and attended a celebratory event at Mar-a-Lago, attended by Trump himself, shortly after he beat Kamala Harris. 

He was backed by Elon Musk, who wrote on X when the claims were made, “I support Russell Brand. That man is not evil.”

If all this is beginning to sound like Brand being fawned over by the far right rather than the left – who should have known better but seem to have learned their lesson – then consider too that Tommy Robinson appeared on Brand’s now ironically titled Stay Free podcast in March 2026. 

The gruesome twosome prayed together, and Robinson asked whether Brand’s legal troubles might have begun as a response to a crusade against “big pharma”. Brand claimed he was being targeted for his attempts to “shut down misinformation about the vaccines.”

Consider also the position of GB News’s extravagantly paid star presenter Bev Turner.

Another fellow traveller in Brand’s Covid conspiracy nonsense, when allegations against him emerged in 2023, Turner described him as a “hero”, said she was “confident there was no smoking gun” and told viewers “if he’d offered to come on this morning, we’d’ve had him, let’s be honest”. 

Suggested Reading

How did Kim Kardashian become the queen of America?

Scarlett Harris

Once Brand was convicted, Turner directed her followers to an article written by her three years earlier, in which she wrote: “Although some of the behaviour being alleged is depraved, each instance is nothing more than ‘he said’ versus ‘she said’ through a decade-long time lapse.”

She added that to his fans, “he is a talismanic truth-teller who blends political analysis with spirituality; addiction recovery with humour; football analysis with meditation podcasts.

“He’s a sesquipedalian wordsmith who delivers a rare intellectual perspicacity in a relatable cockney accent. And whatever they tune in to hear, he makes all of his followers feel less alone…

“Maybe I am wrong. Maybe someone will emerge with forensic and visual evidence proving that he was indeed a rapist. At that point, I will hold up my hands and say that I was wrong about the unlikeliness of a conviction.

“But until that happens I hope he can live by his own catchphrase and “stay free” because the message he is desperately trying to send around the world is designed to free every one of us.”

Robert F Kennedy, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Bev Turner. None of these people are remotely of the left. But all have certainly fawned over Russell Brand.