From time to time, it certainly helps to look through my old entries before starting a new one. Given what’s currently in the news, I thought it would be prudent to check what I had written previously about Russel Brand, and found this one from 2014. It concerns his tussle on Newsnight with Nigel Farage, and having reread it I think it would be dishonest for me to now dismiss Brand as an arrogant tosser who I never liked. There was obviously a time when I rather admired him for showing Farage to be the piece of shit he is – there’s no point denying that. At the same time in that entry I write that Brand seemed “too eager to score points and go on the attack than to deal with the questions at hand.” That is, he was there more for the spectacle and attention than the actual politics: he was obviously more interested in getting airtime than defeating the scoundrel who would later do so much damage to the nation. That, in retrospect, surely tells us everything we need to know about Brand. Like so many people these days, he will jump onto any political or cultural bandwagon he can if it will get him airtime or attention. For a while he was a cheerleader for the Left, but as soon as the political tide turned so apparently did his opinion. More to the point, he obviously thinks he should have the right to say or do whatever he likes with complete impunity, just because of who he is. It’s a type of self-centred narcissism which seems to be becoming more and more rampant; although it’s good to see that such charlatans aren’t as invulnerable as they might think.