20 VILE THINGS ABOUT A VILE MAN
In 2001, Russell Brand was arrested and charged with criminal damage and indecent exposure when he stripped naked while covering May Day protests for music station MTV.
The day after /11, Brand turned up for work at MTV dressed as Osama bin Laden. He was sacked two days later.
In 2002 he was dismissed from the Xfm radio station after he read pornographic material on air on a Sunday afternoon show.
In 2008, Brand and friend Jonathan Ross left vile messages on the answerphone of the elderly Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs.
The presenters then imagined Mr Sachs killing himself. Brand said: ‘The main news again. Manuel Andrew Sachs hung himself today.’ The BBC was later fined £150,000 by Ofcom. During a performance at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton in July 2008, he wasted police time with a hoax call, claiming he had spotted a man responsible for a series of assaults. No charges were brought after he apologised.
In June 2013 Fox TV axed his late-night talk show, Brand X, after he was criticised by viewers for a series of tasteless jokes, including a claim that Princess Diana took cocaine.
On Lady Thatcher, he wrote in the Guardian: ‘Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn’t sad for anyone else.’
In October 2013, he was kicked out of an awards ceremony after making Nazi jibes about the sponsor, the German fashion company Hugo Boss. He placed a finger under his nose and goose-stepped.
Also in 2013 he described how, for a television programme, he once brought ‘a man to the point of orgasm in a public bathroom’. He said the stated purpose was to ‘see if that makes me gay’.
Despite apparently considering a run for London Mayor, he has urged his young followers not to take part in elections. He said: ‘Don’t bother voting. We know it’s not going to make any difference.’
He wants more social housing – while living in a £2million flat whose owners are based in a tax haven – but says of paying taxes: ‘Take away corporate power. Don’t cooperate. Organise, don’t pay your mortgages, don’t pay your taxes.’
In his 2014 book Revolution, he attacked the notion that voting is commensurate with freedom, saying: ‘It p***** me off. It makes me want to get together a gang of Toxteth’s finest, of Broadwater Farm’s most deadly, Belfast’s most up for it, and light up the Westminster sky.’
The same book contained jokes about beheading Prince George with a ‘Fisher Price guillotine’.
On told BBC2’s Newsnight he was ‘ open- minded’ as to whether the US government was behind the /11 attacks. He claimed there was an ‘interesting relationship’ between the families of former US president George Bush and Bin Laden.
Despite its assiduous court- ing of Brand, he has also turned on the BBC. He said that, by reporting the suspected terrorist murder of a soldier stood by a war memorial in Ottawa, Canada, the Corporation was trying to ‘build an anti-Islamic narrative.’
On his years as a heroin addict, he says: ‘It doesn’t make a difference to me. The money, the fame, the power, the sex, the women – none of it. I’d rather be a drug addict.’
At the start of this year, he launched a foul-mouthed attack on the same Labour Party now courting him, calling Ed Balls a ‘clicky-wristed snidey c***’ on a Channel 4 comedy show. Balls called him a ‘pound shop Ben Elton’.
He has blamed Britain’s ‘corrupt’ society for the radicalisation of Islamic State fanatic Jihadi John, claiming that Mohammed Emwazi must have felt ‘ loneliness’ and ‘alienation’.
In the same rant, he said that even if Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg joined the Islamic State, he would still have made ‘more corrupt political alliances’ – a reference to the Tory and Lib Dem coalition.