Russell brand

I’m often asked by other free school proposers what lessons I’ve learnt over the past five years. Any pearls of wisdom I can pass on so they don’t make the same mistakes? My standard response is to reel off a checklist of things I would have done differently if I’d known then what I know now. To take just one example, we probably wouldn’t have introduced a ‘no packed lunch’ rule if we’d known that we’d have to provide all our four-to-seven-year-olds with free school meals. But the biggest lesson is one I daren’t share, which is that trying to give children a better education than the neighbouring local authority

‘I don’t think Russell Brand has read much Orwell’, says the Catholic Herald, responding to the multi-millionaire revolutionary’s YouTube claim that IS are less of a threat than David Cameron: ‘Not just because he recently described Owen Jones as our generation’s incarnation of the left-wing iconoclast, but because yesterday he engaged in the kind of apologia for foreign fascism which the great man built his reputation on condemning.’ Brand’s video has now been seen by more than 200,000 people, and guess who is helping him make these visual treats happen? Non other than the self-confessed plagiarist and disgraced former Indy columnist Johann Hari. Hari was the ideological lodestar for the

Yes, yes, yes, some young ‘uns support UKIP. Just as a few black people do too. But come on. We all know – because the polling tells us so – that UKIP supporters are likely to be older and whiter than the average voter and, most importantly, also more certain that the whole bleedin’ country is going to the dogs. The sodding dogs, I tell you. It isn’t. Of course there are problems. Of course there are great injustices that need correcting. Of course there are difficult, often intractable, policy debates that resist easy answers. There always have been and always will be. Change is always alarming and always unavoidable.

Russell Brand won’t let go of his row with the BBC. He popped up as the mystery guest at Letters Live (a spin off from the wonderful Twitter account @LettersOfNote, where assorted luvvies read great letters from the past). Inevitably, Brand screwed up his reading. He tried to rescue the situation by quipping: ‘Is this like when I broke the BBC?’ This was met by assorted groans and the odd clap. Brand’s references to his suspension and departure from the BBC over the ‘Sachs-gate’ affair in 2008 are getting very tiresome indeed. Mr S was under the impression that Brand was busy plotting a revolution.

He is the corpulent, gluttonous apotheosis of our hegemonic hierarchical hypocrisy, peddling the shimmering mirage of materialistic cupidity to the dazzled masses while propping up the paradigm of the patriarchal power structure. The question is unavoidable. When will the people finally revolt against the tyranny of Santa Claus? We tell the poor to venerate him as some bibulous, avuncular altruist. Yet in reality this porcine Pol Pot, this crimson-clad Caligula, works just one day a year, while forcing a sweatshop of subjugated elves to toil under his whiskery yoke for the other 364. Inside each house on his snow-swaddled route he gorges on the sherry and mince pies proffered by the

I see that Russell Brand has morphed into Mehdi Hassan. Mehdi, if you remember, excoriated The Daily Mail and then the paper published the cringe-worthy paean of praise Hassan had written to the paper’s editor in chief, Paul Dacre, when he was after a job. Brand, meanwhile, has bravely stuck it to The Sun newspaper and of course the most evil man in the entire history of mankind, Rupert Murdoch. The paper apparently ran a story that Brand had cheated on his girlfriend. Yes, yes, I know – big story. Anyway, in his usual tortured prose Brand kicked the hell out of The Sun. And then The Sun revealed that