I was blind to Russell Brand — in my tribe we all were

How do you not see something that’s right in front of you? Is it wilful ignorance or blinkered arrogance? I’ve been asking myself these questions as the stories about Russell Brand’s misogyny came out over the past week. Because Brand was right in front of me — he was literally in my workplace. And I didn’t see it — not at first, anyway.

The coverage has involved a lot of finger-pointing as people scramble to examine his public behaviour and declare who enabled Brand the most. Of course Brand’s alleged victims should be the focus. But there also needs to be a clear-eyed examination of how Brand — always an obvious sexist — became so influential. Otherwise you’re just offering women thoughts and prayers. It’s all very well airily claiming Brand’s career was simply part of the unique culture of the uniquely awful 2000s, but it wasn’t. It’s part of something else, something a lot of people are still reluctant to face.

I never saw any of Brand’s stand-up routines or TV shows; I didn’t read his book, because the title, My Booky-Wook, made me queasy. All I knew about him, really, was that he was very famous and he was a columnist on The Guardian, where I worked too. His columns proved to me that he was on the right side. My side. The side that was against nasty politicians and the evil Daily Mail and so on. And that was as much as I thought about him.

Back then I didn’t really question things. In that era, by which I mean roughly 2009 to 2014, I thought I wrote about feminist issues, but what that really meant was writing that the Daily Mail was evil (always) and women’s magazines were bad and men’s magazines were worse. Groundbreaking stuff. Somehow, amid all my feminist-lite fervour, it didn’t occur to me to ask, “Is it not a bit weird that a man who phoned up Andrew Sachs to tell him that he had had sex with his granddaughter, and then broadcast a recording of it, is now at a Guardian morning conference, sitting yards from me?” Because he was on my side, of course. The right side.

In 2014 Brand was on Newsnight, and he was so obviously idiotic that I wrote a piece saying exactly that. But because I still thought of him as being on my side (the right side!) I included this line at the end: “Brand is, I have no doubt, one of the good guys.” By which I meant, “OK, he’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot, yeah?” A few weeks after that, I saw Brand had endorsed an especially misogynistic dating guide for men, saying it had “turned me from a desperate wallflower into a wallflower who can talk women into sex”. Hmm, maybe not one of the good guys after all. Shortly after that, I started to write about antisemitism on the left, but that’s another story.

Partisanship is a helluva drug. It’s a way of outsourcing your critical judgment so you never have to think, “What do I actually think of this?” You just think, “It’s on my side, ergo it’s good.” It’s why The Guardian and the New Statesman feted Brand when he was in his “capitalism is bad” phase, and it’s why conspiracy theorists are furiously defending him now that he’s in his “capitalism is a global conspiracy” phase.

In the past week I’ve seen emails showing that some of the women who wrote for the New Statesman expressed disquiet after Brand guest-edited an edition of the magazine in 2013, although there is no indication that objections were ever raised with the magazine’s staff. Millions of people read his memoir, in which he talked about spitting on a prostitute; thousands watched his stand-up routine in which he talked about liking blow jobs that make the woman’s mascara run. Yet he got glowing reviews around the world, from The New York Times to, yes, The Guardian, in which no eyebrows were raised. In 2017 Stylist magazine put Brand on the cover with the line: “Why we need more men like Russell Brand”.

The right wing played its part in elevating Brand, according him a political bogeyman status that served him well. But the left did more. The British hard left has a long history of treating women as irrelevant collateral. Female Labour MPs have long complained about sexism on the left (“Left-wing men are the worst — the actual worst,” Jess Phillips has said). The left is also prone to worshipping messianic male figures. At the most extreme end, Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s and 1980s and accused of being a rapist, was vehemently defended by supporters. In 2013 a 19-year-old woman accused Martin Smith, then the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, of rape. While he was never charged, the SWP swept the allegations under the carpet, with one member of the disputes committee saying the party had “no faith in the bourgeois court system to deliver justice”.

It is no surprise that so many of the men photographed cosying up to Brand — Jeremy Corbyn, Billy Bragg and others — are from the far left. People say things have changed since the 2000s, but not in this arena, they haven’t. Many far-left men now express their misogyny not by praising a comedian who talked about choking women with blow jobs but by sneering at women for defending their rights and maintaining their boundaries, calling them Karens and bigots and Terfs. And the women around them say nothing — because they’re all on the same side, right? As I said, partisanship is a strong drug.

This article was amended on September 28, 2023, to make clear that senior editorial staff at the New Statesman were not made aware of any objections to Russell Brand guest-editing an edition of the magazine in 2013