BRENDAN O’NEILL: Russell Brand and the tyranny of the Greater Good.

Brand is the Jimmy Savile of the liberal elite. He’s the pig whose sexist blather and misogynistic behaviour they were ‘willing to overlook’, just as their stiffer, posher forebears of the 1980s media establishment overlooked the tsunami of rumours about Savile. In both instances, a blind eye was turned in the name of the Greater Good. In Savile’s case, that ‘good’ was his charity work, his primetime ratings, his position as an elder statesman of BBC pop and his chuminess with royalty. In Brand’s case, it was his saucy leftism, his frisson of ‘revolution’ in an era of Cameroon Toryism, his sprinkling of debauchery at a tired BBC and his chuminess with the bourgeois press. The result was the same, though: female safety traded in for fleeting moral gain.

[Owen] Jones [of the Grauniad] is not alone. There are numerous reports and allegations that media bigwigs were ‘willing to overlook’ Brand’s comments and behaviour on the grounds that he was a cash cow, the great spicer-up of their bland output. It is alleged that as early as 2013, Channel 4 executives considered reducing the number of female production staff on Brand’s shows, so that they wouldn’t be victimised. The BBC failed to investigate Brand after he flashed his penis at a female member of staff in its LA offices in 2009. As Konstantin Kisin says, ‘the fact that Brand [was] a rapist’ was an ‘open secret’ in British comedy circles, yet little was done.

This is pure Savile territory. The wilfully blind might be different – younger, less stuffy and more ‘hip’ than the BBC suits who ignored whispers about Savile’s depravity. But their instinct was the same: to stare at their shoes as rumours swirled because their man was just too damn useful, whether because he was making gains for the crappy Labour left or money for TV execs. In both cases we witnessed the tyranny of the Greater Good – the horrors that can flow, or at least go under the radar, when elites prioritise riches or ideology over decency.

“This is pure Savile territory,”  for several reasons, as Kisin tweeted today. “[A] lot of people commenting on the Russell Brand case don’t understand how defamation law works in Britain…If you publicly make a claim about another person, that person can sue you for defamation and you will reliably lose and have to pay them huge damages, as well as their legal costs and your own, unless you can prove that your claim is true. Large media organisations like major newspapers will sometimes risk publishing claims they believe to be true on the basis that a story is in the public interest and an honest opinion but they regularly lose defamation cases and pay out millions in lost and settled cases. So, when I say that Russell Brand being a rapist was an ‘open secret’ on the British comedy circuit – that is a fact that is perfectly compatible with the fact that people didn’t say anything about it in public. From memory, some tried and were threatened or even sued into submission.”