The many ages of Russell Brand

When a  lot of people thought that Russell Brand was a twat I was inclined to stick up for him. He may have been  overly-pleased with his own smart-arsery and indulged this egotistically with a painfully self-conscious verbosity,  but I still had a soft spot for him. 

Perhaps because as a teacher, I am used to clever and precocious sixth formers who want to show off that they have swallowed a dictionary, and are using it to pass off ideas that have been bleeding obvious to everyone else for many years. As if they were rare insights that they alone have just discovered. And when you're 17 or 18, that's ok. In fact it can be quite sweet. 

But of course if you're a grown man with a minor celebrity status which allows you to  market the bleeding obvious as some sort of original revolutionary manifesto,  it's rather less sweet. However, despite the fact that he is actually only 10years younger than me, I regarded  Russell as some sort of hyper-active man-child, so  I was still willing to indulge him. 

But  in his latest about-face call for a Labour vote it seems that Russell has now moved on from being the precocious sixth former to the rather nauseating trusti-farian brat who having spent a summer working at daddy's firm and been taken to lunch with the grown ups, has now decided that he must change the system from the inside.