I enjoyed Rod Liddle’s recent article in the UK Spectator (a terrific magazine) for its accurate analysis of the dullness of political interviewing at the monolithically smug BBC, but most of all for this hilariously accurate description of an increasingly common pox on society: the celebrity who has become an expert on politics, genus thespis insufferabilis, in this case the former comedian and aspiring philosopher-king Russell Brand:

I watched Russell’s latest address to the world, which he delivers regularly from his bedroom—complete with those by now familiar mangled, high-camp estuarial vowels, tortuously pretentious grammar and infantile, uninformed narcissistic political opinions. Russell sits on the bed and tells us about the state of the world, man, and how it’s all, like, shit, and this stuff in Iraq well, hell, I don’t blame them, those British jihadis, because Cameron’s evil, evil, evil and life must be really horrible here if they want to up sticks and fight with Isis in a country where there are almost no decent hair-care products, so it’s all our fault or—more properly—yours.

That’s why I enjoy my mornings in bed with Russell. It’s like a condensed version of a particularly bad edition of the Guardian, filtered through the veins of an imbecile. Russell told the world not so long ago that there was no point in voting because it changes nuffink, innit. The sort of thing you hear not from the pub bore, but from the bedraggled halfwit in the corner with his half pint of Guinness, who even the pub bore finds insuperably tedious. Incoherent faux-left conspiracy theories that would have made even the late Tony Benn blush with embarrassment. Owen Jones when he was still mithering around, falling over and having tantrums, in kindergarten.

“It’s like a condensed version of a particularly bad edition of the Guardian, filtered through the veins of an imbecile.” Exquisite.

Read it here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9309752/russell-brand-is-duller-than-even-the-grimmest-political-interview/.