Labour’s 2015 Russell Brand interview with Ed Miliband, Digi Mart USA News (United Kingdom): Around 10pm on 27 April 2015, less than a fortnight before that year’s general election, a grainy photo appeared on Twitter and caused a media sensation. It showed then Labour leader Ed Miliband getting into a car outside a house in Shoreditch, east London, owned by comedian Russell Brand.
The photo was quickly confirmed as showing Miliband leaving Brand’s home after secretly recording an interview that would appear on Brand’s YouTube channel a couple of days later. At the time, Miliband’s circle were delighted with the encounter and Brand’s subsequent endorsement, with Labour spinners seriously believing it could swing the election.
A former BBC news executive who dealt with Miliband’s team during the campaign recalled to The i Paper: “Labour were constantly on the phone, telling me what a coup it was to get Brand. They thought they’d nailed it.” Within days, however, it became clear that this optimism was misplaced, and Labour recorded its poorest general election result since 1987.
The episode might once have been viewed as a curiosity in British political history. It has taken on a different meaning since multiple allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brand were reported by The Sunday Times and Channel 4 in 2023.
On Thursday, Brand was convicted of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. He is also being investigated by police over rape allegations from two more women.
The conviction has reopened questions about why Labour and Miliband, who is now Foreign Secretary and one of Andy Burnham’s closest allies, decided to court Brand. Burnham had shown support for Brand in December 2014 following a Sun story about the comedian’s housing arrangements, posting on Twitter: “Depressing to see media mission to discredit someone who stops playing their game & uses celebrity to help others.
Keep going [Brand].”
Asked on Friday about Labour’s previous courting of the comedian, the Prime Minister said: “All I can say is, I had no idea of the full extent of what he was doing or what he went on to do. His crimes are horrific.
He’s rightly been held to account, justice for the victims and that is the right course that’s been taken here.” He added: “It’s not always the case that people know everything about people in public life, but what is important is that where there is wrongdoing, it is exposed.”
Both Miliband’s decision to meet Brand and Burnham’s supportive tweet came years before Brand was publicly accused of rape. Even at the time, however, Brand was a highly controversial figure.
In 2008 he was fired from various roles over a notorious Radio 2 broadcast, known as “Sachsgate”, in which he and Jonathan Ross left voicemails for actor Andrew Sachs boasting that Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. His 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, described a “victims’ list” of “the women I’ve wronged as a result of my sexual addiction”; the book’s lurid anecdotes did not cause a stir at the time.
By 2013 Brand was making forays into social and political commentary. A former heroin addict, he gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee on drugs policy in 2012, wrote op-eds for The Guardian, guest-edited The New Statesman in 2013, and in 2014 appeared on BBC Question Time, trading barbs with Nigel Farage.
In April 2013, Burnham, then shadow health secretary, shared a Guardian op-ed by Brand on the death of Margaret Thatcher on Twitter, calling it the “best thing ever written by a West Ham fan.”
By the 2015 election, Brand hosted a YouTube channel, The Trews, which had millions of subscribers. His young audience, and his 2013 Newsnight admission that he had “never voted, never will,” prompted Miliband to engage with him.
The details of how the interview was conceived remain unclear. After the rape allegations emerged in 2023, The Telegraph reported that Lucy Powell, vice-chair of the 2015 campaign and now Labour’s deputy leader and Education Secretary, “brought the idea in.” A source close to Powell disputed this, telling The i Paper that Brand had approached the party about the interview.
Several members of Miliband’s 2015 inner circle now hold senior roles in Burnham’s government. Torsten Bell, Miliband’s former policy director, is pensions minister, and Stewart Wood, another former adviser, is a peer and Foreign Office minister.
The rationale for the interview was not disputed: young people were more likely to hold left-wing views but less likely to vote, so Miliband hoped to reach previously untapped voters. A Labour source told The Telegraph in 2023: “It wasn’t a lunatic idea to get someone who had a big following among young people to persuade them to vote and to vote Labour.”
In the interview, Miliband sat in Brand’s kitchen discussing topics such as Rupert Murdoch, banks and taking on vested interests. Days later, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron derided the encounter, calling Brand a “joke,” but Miliband defended it: “I’ll engage with anyone, anyhow, to persuade more people to turn out and vote, and to vote Labour.” When Brand endorsed Labour a few days before the election, many party supporters were delighted.
Guardian columnist Owen Jones wrote a piece headlined “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried.”
In the event, Labour fell from 256 seats to 232 in the election held on 7 May 2015. Although the party led the Tories among younger voters, subsequent analysis by Ipsos found “no significant increase in turnout among young people,” with 18 to 24-year-olds almost half as likely to vote as those aged 65 and over.
Brand had missed the deadline to register to vote, so he could not have voted anyway.
After the rape allegations surfaced, some who worked on Labour’s 2015 campaign said Miliband had been wrong to do the interview. Ayesha Hazarika, a former Labour adviser now a peer and broadcaster, told the BBC it had been a “terrible decision,” blaming the fact that “there weren’t a lot of women in the room making these decisions.” In September 2023, Miliband told the BBC’s Today programme that he regretted the interview: “Knowing what I know now – and I was not aware of these allegations at the time about Russell Brand – I wouldn’t have done that interview and I regret doing it.” A spokesman for Miliband said: “These are horrific crimes that Russell Brand has been found guilty of and Ed’s profound sympathy is with the victims.”
