Russell Brand has my vote

You may have noticed Russell Brand being in the news a bit this week: not for his shagging or drug exploits or even for offending the delicate, but for saying that he doesn’t vote.

That derives from this, an article he wrote for the New Statesman – which he was guest editing this week.

Quite what it means to get a celebrity to “guest edit” a magazine, I don’t really know. How many crap contributions were spiked by Russell Brand? Did he give the advertising department a hard time for a lack of renewals? I suppose we’ll never know.

Anyway, over the course of 4,500 words, Russell Brand (celebrities are always to be referred to by their full names – that’s in the ODHSNM style guide. The editor would have a fit if I didn’t follow it) says this:

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

He also says:

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

This has caused an eruption of ruffled pomposity from the political and media establishment this week – whose response to Russell Brand’s unauthorised trespass into their exclusive domain has been akin to the expression on the face of a wood pigeon that has just fallen out of a tree.

It is best summed up by the tired spectacle of that sneering symbol of everything that is loathsome and exclusive about the establishment, Jeremy Paxman, calling him a “trivial man” on Newsnight – followed by columnist after columnist commenting on this and then on each other’s comments, like a dog eating its own shit, sicking it up, and then eating it again.  

The argument appears to be that Russell Brand is not entitled to express an opinion on politics because he chooses not to vote, despite having a reasoned explanation as to why this is. Maybe Russell Brand's explanation can shed some light on why millions of other people don't vote - or is that an impossibility because he's a Hollywood celebrity? I'd suggest that he has more in common with those non-voters than anyone playing the Westminster game. 

Russell Brand is a witty man who expresses himself well, while also annoying people and being a monstrous show-off. Who else was like that? Socrates was a lot like that. You could argue that Jesus was a lot like that.

CLEARLY I AM NOT COMPARING RUSSELL BRAND TO JESUS OR SOCRATES. Come on, this isn’t the Daily Telegraph comments section.

You don’t have to agree with his point of view (Russell Brand even points out later in the article – YES, I DID read it all – that he acknowledges that apathy also comes from laziness and the inability to care about distant things) but he deserves a hearing. That’s what’s different between today and back then. 

Equally ridiculous looking

Russell Brand may not be the best person to explode the political/media/business cabal, but so what if what he says resonates with people? Paxman trivialises himself once again by playing the man not the ball. His persona and schtick is just as absurd as Russell Brand's. 

Plus, this is not a new point of view. Here’s HG Wells, 100 years ago talking about Parliament.

So far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature. 

Politicians are: 

Not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box 

Criticising the electoral system, HG Wells (the celebrity, not the conference centre) says 

The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Echoing Russell Brand, HG Wells goes on: 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. 

Last quote, I promise: 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. 

Perhaps HG Wells was a “trivial man” too. He did, after all, write science fiction novels, thought bicycles were the future of warfare and was a prominent “useful idiot” for Lenin.  

Oops - now we can't take him seriously on anything

Perhaps I am a trivial man too. Almost certainly I am. 

And I'd much rather be one than the sort of creature a Paxman takes seriously. 

My point is simply that there has been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the (still) prevailing political orthodoxy that goes is more than a hundred years old. That critique is not new, nor is it something that establishment has a right to reject out of hand because a “celebrity” is putting it forward. 

You shouldn’t have to be nothing but “serious” to be taken seriously. Politics is not the sole domain of people who have never thought about or done anything other than politics. 

The meaning of “democracy” is not exhausted by the Westminster farce and the media wankers who tell you what you can think about it. Russell Brand has reached his own conclusions – so can you. It's as much ours as it is theirs. 

Boris the Baptist

As you could tell from the London Olympic opening ceremony, we now have a post-modern public culture. We are ironical, eclectic, genre-subverting, fusion-cooking, mixing up Chelsea Pensioners and lesbian kisses. We are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. The only politician who ‘gets’ any of this is Boris. He can mix Virgil and James Bond, a posh accent and street cred, conservative politics and a liberal spirit. Mr Cameron is the moderniser, but Boris is the post-moderniser.

So sayeth Charles Moore in the Telegraph this weekend.

There are many people who understand post-modernism better than me; people who have written whole books about it. And to them I say “Big Mac and fries please”. HA HA.

Whatever it means, Moore is right. For example, the generation which includes the prime minister has its idea of the 1980s defined as much by Five Star as by Margaret Thatcher, and as much by Five Star being called “fucking crap” on Going Live as by System Addict.

And every generation younger than that is similarly drenched in post-modern irony.

We are barely able to take listen to someone making a political or moral argument without writing them off as a fanatic or a hypocrite because relativism has become such a thoroughly ingrained habit.

Can you take seriously someone who sets themselves up as infallible, motivated only by noble desires, dedicated to nothing but public service and bettering the lot of their fellow men?

No, me neither. I am too silly, too overwhelmed by schadenfreude, too lazy – too post-modern – to regard that kind of a template for a human being with anything other than contempt.

Celebrities, on the other hand, are human - all too human.

So along comes Boris, the celebrity politician, and he is literally able to have a crowd of thousands chanting his name, surrounded by flags and flames – like the 20^th Century NEVER HAPPENED!

If everyone didn’t think Boris wasn’t serious, that would have been terrifying. So what was is he?

Boris Johnson is not a “one-off” or someone to whom the political rulebook doesn’t apply - he is a mutated virus. Along with Louise Mensch, he is the prototype of the next generation of celebrity politicians - he's John the Baptist for whatever kind of Jesus is coming next. By approaching us as celebrities, they are penetrating the defences we have put up against “politicians”.

They are reframing the terms of political discourse. The political parties are surely watching their apparently unique charisma at work and attempting to work out how to bottle it and routinise it. The question is, when the medium changes, what messages will we suddenly become susceptible to all over again?

A famous person spoke to me

I was on the phone to Elvira from Kings Cross Station, trying to make myself heard over the resonating boom of the platform announcements, when he strode into my field of vision.

To begin with, I wasn’t quite sure what it was. A hint of recognition captured my attention. There was a familiarity to this face amongst the thousands of strangers I had passed by, barely noticing, on my commute through the busiest and loneliest parts of the capital.

Then it struck me – I recognised him, like Fraggle Rock lighthouse against a stormy sea! But where did I know him from? Was it someone I knew? I looked at his brown coat with black collar. His black satchel. His blue checked shirt. His closely cropped hair, fooling no one in concealing male pattern baldness.

I knew the face, no doubt about it. Wait a minute – a flash of inspiration and I knew exactly who it was. It was none other than TV’s very own Phil Spencer, the Channel 4 property guru and co-host of once-must-see-now-hopelessly-retreading-the-same-old-ground sensation, Location Location Location!

My heart skipped a beat. Possibly two. I told Elvira I was looking at a real life celebrity – and not a rubbish one like the time I saw Richard Stilgoe in Leicester Square. Someone who people I told would have heard of.

And here at Kings Cross Station no less, where only seconds beforehand I had seen a bald female homeless person demanding that a hapless passer-by buy her a sandwich. She wasn’t asking for money – she was asking for a sandwich. Cheese and tomato in fact.

Oh, where else could you see an intimidating beggar one minute and a TV house buying expert in the same place? Where, but wonderful, magical London town?

He walked towards me. I had to stop describing him to my wife, lest he realise I was talking about him and I look like a star-struck peasant. He walked round behind me. I held my breath. He walked on, and had a bit of a look at what was on offer at Burger King.

I looked up at the departures board. Still my train had “not yet arrived”. But it was “on time”, so that was ok. I looked back - I had lost sight of Phil.

Thinking my brush with fame was over, and still having 20 minutes to kill, I went to buy a bottle of water and reflect on whether seeing Phil Spencer at a railway station in 2012 was better than seeing Bob Geldof at the National Gallery in 1998, or Phil Tufnell at Sharm el Sheikh airport in 2006.

Well, fate had not finished with me for the evening yet.

Who do you suppose was in the station shop, perusing the pot salads? Yes, him. Celebrities even eat better than us, I thought – but at the end of the day, I challenge anyone to spend £3.37 more satisfyingly than at McDonalds.

I joined the queue. As he walked towards the back of the queue, the woman in front of me greeted him. God, what an idiot, I thought. How embarrassing. For all of us. Especially me and Phil.

But Phil was delighted. Turns out they knew each other. Or something. I wasn’t listening. I was inspecting his face, in all its familiar high-definition detail – there, in conversational animation just a couple of feet in front of my very eyes. I could well imagine him, with resigned good humour, telling a young couple how unrealistic their expectations for £150,000 were, or casting a sly glance to the camera and saying that he’d found something this one – no matter how awkward she’d been so far – was going to love. I could almost hear Kirsty’s voiceover pretending to talk back to him in those prematurely headmistressy tones.

And then it happened.

Salad in hand, Phil turned to me and said “do you mind if I...”

He meant, “push in the queue in front of you and carry on talking to this lady”. But he didn’t finish the sentence. His star power completed it for him. It said “I am a popular TV personality, who you obviously recognise. Indeed, I’m sure I overheard you talking about me to your wife about five minutes ago, when I walked behind you. And now you’ve followed me in here, like a stalker. Oh yes, random people in crowds rarely catch my eye or say ‘Location Location Location’ as I’m passing by – so when they do, I always pay attention. I am sure you will indulge me, clearly the normal rules of railway station shopping do not apply”.

“Not at all”, I replied.  

Like this sort of thing happens to me every day.

The rest of the journey home after that was just a blur.