There are few stranger public careers than that of Russell Brand, the former ‘comedian’ turned MAGA cheerleader-in-chief. He has given an interview to Tucker Carlson, another figure who has been on his own peculiar journey, and has announced his intention of running for Mayor of London in 2028, on a vaguely defined but somehow sinister platform that includes ‘pragmatic’ democracy for ‘people who live in London, who love London’.

Brand has railed against most of Sadiq Khan’s innovations, asking: ‘Do you want Ulez cameras? Do you want congestion charges? Do you want this type of policing where people are arrested for Facebook posts? Do you want us to focus on contemporary rape gangs?’ Most Spectator readers might agree with these questions, were it not for the person asking them. His interview comes shortly after another conversation with the American journalist Megyn Kelly, in which he declared that he’d had sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 30.

While he was........

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