It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s always the ones you least expect who turn out to be wrong ‘uns. Who would have thought that Jimmy Savile would turn out to be a predatory sex offender, or that Russell Brand was a controlling rapist? Or that David Walliams, WHO IS AN INNOCENT MAN, might just be another pervert (allegedly). Then, there’s ex Bristol Rovers manager Joey Barton who always came across as the most mild-mannered gentle soul. Yes, the ones we least expect. Or maybe not?
Slowly, but surely, the worst people in the land are being exposed for who and what they are and, not before time, some are facing justice. None of this comes easy because many of those who are up before the beak, or are at the stage of being investigated, are not poor people. Brand, Walliams, Savile and all the rest of them had money and lots of it. And money brings power. And power is at the core of the very bad things these people did.
I always felt I was in a minority when it came to Brand. I always found him extremely creepy, something he shares with many of these other dubious people, I never found him to be remotely funny and I never understood why women seemed to fall at his feet. Perhaps, as a straight man, I am not in the best position to judge Brand’s good looks. I am more inclined to regard him in the same category as the late entertainer Paul Daniels, whose wife Debbie McGee was once asked “what attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
Many of these people appear to have very little talent. Savile’s ace was his confidence and his gift of the gab. He could not sing, dance, write, play anything, act; nothing. Brand realised early on how people with supreme confidence could become successful and rich, despite an absence of obvious talent. There was a generation of people like that, including the likes of Walliams, Jonathan Ross and the eternally creepy Noel Fielding, who now appears on telly’s cake-making extravaganza The Great British Bakeoff for reasons well beyond my level of understanding. A golden generation of untalented people who could say and do what they wanted.
Ross has always taken his so-called jokes to what we might call the limit. It’s his shtick to say the things others wouldn’t, including at an awards ceremony a few years ago when he literally said that David Walliams could well be taking home a 15 year-old girl at the end of the evening. Well, it’s only paedophilia, isn’t it? And it’s just a joke, unless that is you’re a child victim of a paedophile, that is. Not quite so funny, then, is it?
Fielding also did paedophilia jokes with Brand, but now of course he’s “horrified and deeply disturbed”, as anyone would be if their future career prospects might be in jeopardy as a result of their previous dirty deeds. Sure, we’ve all done and said things we shouldn’t have and I am guilty as charged in that department, but oddly enough I don’t recall making jokes about rape and paedophilia. Call me old fashioned, but for some reason I don’t find these very serious subjects funny at all.
Eventually, Brand’s money and the place in the establishment his money bought him, wasn’t enough. Women of immense courage and principle eventually saw him off to prison, no thanks to Brand’s lawyer who did his level best to trash and humiliate the victims in court. It was so ghastly, it was all I could do to read the reports, especially of the anal rape committed by Brand, leaving the bed he shared with a victim covered in blood, faeces and semen. The 18,000 cretins who have signed a petition calling for Brand’s release from prison and the thousands more who see him as a victim of ‘two-tier justice’ need urgent psychiatric help. The only two tiers are the innocent and the criminals. Brand, as a matter of fact, is in the latter.
Still, the power in Britain lies with the rich and powerful. Only they can afford lawyers. Only they can suppress the little people, which is most of us. The rest of us live with no power, especially women who are used by deviants like Brand as mere objects for non-consensual sex. It was always thus. At least this time, the little people – I won’t say won – had a successful day in court. Because no one really won, not really.
The worst offenders, it seems, carry out their perverted actions in plain sight. They behave abominably in public so I guess we think it’s just an act, but sometimes it isn’t. The Sun’s three-time “Shagger of the Year”, Russell Brand, was the person many of us feared he might be. I do not pretend to be an expert in character but he had something of the night about him, just like Savile and maybe, although we do not know for sure yet BECAUSE HE IS AN INNOCENT MAN, the ultra creepy and talentless David Walliams.
The American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said this: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”. If more of us could do that, the world would soon become a kinder, gentler and infinitely better place.
