M Chesney-Stroak

The early 2010s, when Russell Brand’s reputation was at its peak, were an unlovely period in recent British history, especially media culture. The worst aspects of Brand’s conduct had already manifested themselves in the preceding decade, but this did not prevent his subsequent elevation into something approaching a public intellectual. Narcissistic kidults were celebrated as insightful truth-tellers; performative, self-righteous indignation was mistaken for intellectual seriousness, loudness for courage, certainty for knowledge, and self-dramatisation for independence of mind. More established forms of informed, measured and thoughtful judgment, refined through experience and reflection, were increasingly dismissed as dull or reactionary. The prominence, in different ways, of figures such as Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, Katie Hopkins and Milo Yiannopoulos, followed later in the decade by Charlotte Church as a political activist, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar, reflected a wider celebration of adolescent modes of behaviour in adults. These figures exhibited different combinations of impulsiveness, ostentatious defiance and attention-seeking, too often mistaken for intellectual and moral courage. In Brand's case, the narcissism cultivated and indulged by much of the media was that of a man seemingly so in love with himself, so convinced of his own irresistible appeal, that he could scarcely comprehend the possibility that anyone might say ‘no’ to him. This is not to associate any of these other figures with Brand’s criminal conduct, but to identify the wider media culture in which his celebrity flourished. There are connections here with a wider political culture of knee-jerk responses, impatience with complexity and a need for emotionally satisfying certainties and slogans, which found expression in aspects of both Corbynism and the Brexit campaign, and which persists today in different populist forms around the Greens and Reform.