Londoner’s Diary
Russell Brand has launched an attack on US Vice President Kamala Harris in a monster 2,700-word post on X. The comedian turned pseudo-spiritual guru says that selecting Harris to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate would be a ”‘bait n’ switch’, ‘find the lady’ cup n’ ball trick” and describes her as “socially inept”. He falls victim to his own verbosity when he writes that Harris is “solely offering cutaneous and genetic novelty to a famished pack of secularist devotees so bewildered that melatonin and an ‘X chromosome’ could represent to them some kind of pyrrhic victory.” Us neither. “Melatonin and an X chromosome” appears to be in reference to the fact that Harris is a black woman, but is Brand confusing the skin pigment melanin with melatonin, a sleep hormone? Perhaps he also forgets that men have an X chromosome too.
Brand’s reboot as a Christian, MAGA-loving right winger was complete when he attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week, which he likened to the atmosphere of The Oscars or the Euros final. “It could’ve been any modern carnival with its iridescent zeal,” he writes convincingly. He is full of praise for some of Trump’s closest allies, describing far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene as an “effulgent soul, full of matriarchal force”, while Eric Trump was apparently “an absolute joy”.
Nick Clegg: Gandhi was a populist
In the last few years many column inches have been dedicated to the rise of populism and the threat it poses to democracy. But one person who thinks it’s all overblown is former leader of the Lib Dems Nick Clegg. “Populism is not necessarily a bad thing,” he told Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on the Leading podcast. “I mean, Gandhi was a populist of sorts, wasn’t he?” Clegg argues that populism is “a very important antidote to complacency, to elitism, to groupthink,” adding that he saw himself as an “anti-establishment politician” by the time he left parliament. He is now President of Global Affairs at Meta, whose platform like Facebook and Instagram are seen as key to the success of Right-wing populists.
