Russell brand

A glittering cast list, delicious food and spectacular entertainment — I just wish you could have been there. But tickets were at a premium for The Spectator’s prestigious Utter Arse of the Year awards ceremony held, as ever, in the council chamber at Tower Hamlets. The meal, prepared by the exciting left-wing lesbian cook Jack Monroe, consisted of her famous kale pesto pasta on a bed of shredded back copies of the Guardian. As we munched away, a troop of locally sourced Bangladeshi mime artists enacted the setting up of an east London caliphate and — to the delight of the audience — silently decapitated several infidels sitting near the stage.

In case you hadn’t heard, Russell Brand was on Question Time last night with Nigel Farage. It was explosive to say the least, with Brand and Farage clashing over pretty much everything. The most electrifying moment - see above - came when a member of the audience rightly pulled up Brand over his throwaway remark that Farage didn't care about disabled people. The fellow pointed out that the Ukip leader had ‘never criticised the disabled’ and told Brand ‘if you’re going to campaign, then stand...you have the media profile for it, do it.

'Any system for chatting up women is in itself questionable’ says Russell Brand today in response to the Julien Blanc scandal, that has seen the Home Office ban the controversial American 'pick-up artist' from touring in the UK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCj5ONvDCz8 Brand continues: 'any (system) that’s sort of based on objectifying or undermining women I would never, never, never, never, never endorse.' Which is odd, because here is Russell Brand endorsing a book that is purely about how to pick up women: Neil Strauss’s writing turned me from a desperate wallflower into a wallflower who can talk women into sex.' Russell Brand       Mr S can inform you that the content of The Game is not very progressive...

I’m often asked by other free school proposers what lessons I’ve learnt over the past five years. Any pearls of wisdom I can pass on so they don’t make the same mistakes? My standard response is to reel off a checklist of things I would have done differently if I’d known then what I know now. To take just one example, we probably wouldn’t have introduced a ‘no packed lunch’ rule if we’d known that we’d have to provide all our four-to-seven-year-olds with free school meals. But the biggest lesson is one I daren’t share, which is that trying to give children a better education than the neighbouring local authority schools, with no additional funding, is really, really difficult.

'I don’t think Russell Brand has read much Orwell', says the Catholic Herald, responding to the multi-millionaire revolutionary's YouTube claim that IS are less of a threat than David Cameron: 'Not just because he recently described Owen Jones as our generation’s incarnation of the left-wing iconoclast, but because yesterday he engaged in the kind of apologia for foreign fascism which the great man built his reputation on condemning.' Brand's video has now been seen by more than 200,000 people, and guess who is helping him make these visual treats happen? Non other than the self-confessed plagiarist and disgraced former Indy columnist Johann Hari.

Yes, yes, yes, some young 'uns support UKIP. Just as a few black people do too. But come on. We all know - because the polling tells us so - that UKIP supporters are likely to be older and whiter than the average voter and, most importantly, also more certain that the whole bleedin' country is going to the dogs. The sodding dogs, I tell you. It isn't. Of course there are problems. Of course there are great injustices that need correcting. Of course there are difficult, often intractable, policy debates that resist easy answers. There always have been and always will be. Change is always alarming and always unavoidable. Stuff happens and the job of real politicians is to manage that change. Real politicians know this. Only phoneys pretend it isn't.

Russell Brand won’t let go of his row with the BBC. He popped up as the mystery guest at Letters Live (a spin off from the wonderful Twitter account @LettersOfNote, where assorted luvvies read great letters from the past). Inevitably, Brand screwed up his reading. He tried to rescue the situation by quipping: ‘Is this like when I broke the BBC?’ This was met by assorted groans and the odd clap. Brand’s references to his suspension and departure from the BBC over the ‘Sachs-gate’ affair in 2008 are getting very tiresome indeed. Mr S was under the impression that Brand was busy plotting a revolution.