In November 1763 the Earl of Sandwich rose in the House of Lords and read aloud from a poem called An Essay on Woman. It was an obscene parody of Pope, printed in a handful of copies on a private press belonging to John Wilkes, and never meant for publication. Nobody in the chamber had any doubt why their lordships were being entertained in this manner. Wilkes had attacked the King’s Speech in the forty-fifth number of the North Briton, and the ministry wanted him ruined. The choice of reader added a touch of comedy, since Sandwich was a man whose own habits would not have survived a similar recital. When The Beggar’s Opera was performed shortly afterwards, the audience greeted Macheath’s complaint that Jemmy Twitcher should peach him with roars of laughter, and the name clung to Sandwich for the rest of his life. Wilkes was convicted of seditious and of obscene libel, outlawed, and in due course imprisoned. He was also, by any reasonable measure, a libertine. The London crowd knew this perfectly well, and made him a symbol of liberty all the same.

I have been thinking about Wilkes since Monday, when Mr Justice Bennathan sentenced Russell Brand at Southwark Crown Court to ten years and six months in prison. The sentence comprises nine years for one rape, committed in 2009, with further terms for three sexual assaults committed between 2004 and 2009. Brand will serve two thirds of it before release on licence. The jury of eight men and four women deliberated for more than eight hours across two days. It convicted him unanimously on four counts and acquitted him of two further rapes and of an attempted indecent assault.

I wish to be clear at the outset about what I am not saying. I do not say that Brand is innocent. I was not in court, I have read only the reports, and the jurors saw and heard witnesses I have not. Nor do I say that any of the complainants lied. I do not know, and it would be improper for me to guess. By his own repeated and public boasting, Brand was in those years a man of grossly promiscuous habits who regarded women chiefly as a means of gratification. His own counsel, Ian Winter KC, told the jury that his conduct might be called “disgusting, distasteful, immoral”, and invited them to treat all of that as irrelevant to the question of crime. The question I wish to raise is a different one. Of all the men in Britain against whom allegations twenty years stale could have been gathered, why was Brand the one against whom the State chose to gather them, and with such energy?

What the jury was given

It is worth looking first at the evidence, since the strength of a prosecution has some bearing on the motives of those who brought it. The Metropolitan Police acknowledged that there was no CCTV and no forensic evidence, and that the passage of time had left very little in the way of digital records. The Crown’s case therefore rested almost entirely on the testimony of the complainants, supplemented by the recollections of people to whom they had spoken afterwards and by evidence about Brand’s general conduct with women.

There is nothing improper in principle about a prosecution built on testimony. Most rapes take place without witnesses, and section 32 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 abolished the old rule by which judges were obliged to warn juries of the danger of convicting on the uncorroborated word of a complainant in a sexual case. I do not altogether regret that change, since the warning rested on assumptions about women that nobody would now care to defend. Even so, the removal of a formal safeguard does not remove the difficulty it was meant to address. When an event is between seventeen and twenty-two years in the past, testimony is all there is, and human memory is not a recording. It is rebuilt each time it is consulted, and it is shaped by everything that has happened since. Every complainant in this trial came forward after a television documentary and a newspaper investigation in September 2023 had told the whole country what kind of man Brand was supposed to be.

Consider the rape count, which accounts for nine of the ten and a half years. If the reports I have read are accurate, the complainant said that the encounter began consensually and became an assault. She told her parents at the time and feared she had contracted HIV, yet neither she nor they went to the police. She said that Brand’s assistant escorted her from the house and that his driver took her to a Tube station and handed her tissues because she was plainly upset. Neither man appears to have given evidence. Some months later there was an exchange of text messages in which she told Brand he had treated her like an animal and he replied that he was sorry. I have been unable to establish from the reports whether the jury saw the messages themselves or heard her recollection of them, and the difference is not trivial. A former boyfriend, interviewed by police in 2025, is reported to have said that she was deeply upset but had “come round”, which suggests that she had been persuaded rather than forced, and a friend recalled her saying that Brand had promised to be gentle. The jury heard all of this, or as much of it as was admitted, and it convicted. That was its right. But nobody who reads the material dispassionately could call it a strong case.

The Soho count is stranger still. The complainant said that at a party of former MTV colleagues Brand grabbed her breasts, and that he then took her to the lavatories and forced her to perform oral sex. The jury convicted him of the first and acquitted him of the second. She accepted that she afterwards travelled in his car to another bar in Camden, though she said she had been shepherded into it without realising whose it was. The groping is said to have taken place in the middle of a crowded bar, yet so far as I can discover nobody who was present gave evidence of having seen it. The same is true of the assault said to have taken place in a corridor at the Capital Radio building in front of Brand’s entourage. The witnesses to that incident, if there were any, were not called.

I have defended the jury in these pages, and I shall defend it again whenever ministers come for it. The jury in this case was evidently conscientious, as its mixed verdicts show, and I do not impugn it. Yet a jury does not choose its cases. It judges what the Crown decides to put before it, in the form the parties and the judge have shaped, and it is drawn from a public that cannot unlearn what it has been told. For two years before the trial the newspapers and broadcasters had treated the allegations as settled, and anyone who questioned them was taken to be insulting the women concerned. The trial judge will have given the usual directions to disregard all that. I have spent a long professional life watching juries being told to forget things, and I have never been persuaded that it works as well as the law pretends. If there was a defect in this prosecution, it lies less in the jury room than in the decisions that preceded it.

How the case began

According to the journalists themselves, their inquiries into Brand began in 2019. By then he had ceased to be the household jester of commercial broadcasting and was becoming something more troublesome. In 2018 he had interviewed Jordan Peterson with a seriousness that the BBC and Channel 4 were unable to manage. In May 2020 he began questioning whether the lockdowns were justified, and through 2021 he attacked vaccine mandates and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on government. In May 2023 he broadcast a long and friendly interview with Robert F Kennedy Jr. By the summer of that year he had several million subscribers on YouTube and a following on Rumble, and he was saying to a very large audience things that the British establishment had spent three years trying to keep off the air.

On 16th September 2023 Channel 4’s Dispatches and The Times and The Sunday Times published their joint investigation. What followed is the instructive part. Within days YouTube suspended his ability to earn money from his channel. The BBC and Channel 4 began removing his old programmes from their archives. Dame Caroline Dinenage, the Conservative chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, wrote to Rumble to ask whether it intended to follow YouTube in cutting off his income, and wrote in similar terms to other platforms. Rumble published its refusal. I invite the reader to consider what this means. The chairman of a select committee of the House of Commons, acting on her own authority, wrote to a private company to ask whether it would deprive a man of his livelihood when he had not been charged with any offence, let alone convicted. The Metropolitan Police announced their investigation during the same week. None of the women whose accounts were broadcast became complainants at the trial. The six who did all came forward afterwards.

I grant that none of this proves a conspiracy, and I make no claim to know what passed in anyone’s mind. Journalists do investigate famous men, and the years after 2017 were a time when many such investigations were undertaken. Dame Caroline’s letter may have been officious rather than sinister. Yet there is a further fact that ought to trouble anyone who believes the institutions concerned were moved by a disinterested concern for women. Brand’s conduct was no secret when it took place. He boasted of it on BBC Radio 2 and in his memoir, My Booky Wook, published in 2007, and the newspapers that now profess to be horrified treated him then as a lovable scamp. The BBC kept him on air until the business of the telephone calls to Andrew Sachs in October 2008, and dropped him for that rather than for anything he had done to women. The broadcasters who now remove his programmes were his employers when the offences were committed. Their interest in his treatment of women awoke only when he had become a political nuisance.

The other cases

The proper measure of a prosecuting authority is not what it does in a single case but whether it does the same thing in like cases. Here the comparison is unavoidable, and it is very damaging.

In 2014 Professor Alexis Jay reported that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. They had been raped, trafficked between towns, and in some instances doused with petrol and threatened with burning. The police and the council knew a great deal of this at the time. Officials were nervous of being thought racist, since the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani heritage, and the girls were treated as undeserving nuisances. In some cases fathers who tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from the houses where they were being abused were themselves arrested. The independent inquiry into Telford, which reported in 2022, found that more than a thousand girls had been abused there over several decades, and that complaints had again been disregarded. Baroness Casey’s audit of 2025 found that the authorities had for years avoided even recording the ethnicity of suspects, that in the areas where data were kept men of Asian heritage were heavily over-represented among those suspected of group-based exploitation, and that there were cases in which the rape of girls under sixteen had been treated as consensual and charges reduced or abandoned. Only after that audit did the Government concede the national inquiry it had spent months refusing.

I do not pretend that there have been no prosecutions. There have been convictions in Rochdale, in Rotherham itself, in Oxford, in Huddersfield and elsewhere, and some of the sentences have been long. But they came years or decades late, usually after journalists or victims had shamed the authorities into acting, and they touched only a fraction of the men involved. What matters for my argument is the contrast in the quality of the evidence. In those cases the complaints were often contemporaneous. There were social workers’ files, medical records, identifiable addresses, named suspects and children who had told the police what was being done to them while it was still being done. The State had everything it needed, and for a generation it looked away. In Brand’s case it had almost nothing beyond testimony two decades old, and it pursued him with every resource at its disposal.

There is, then, one standard for a dissident with a large audience and another for offenders whose prosecution would embarrass the governing ideology. Evidence that would not have prompted a serious inquiry in Rotherham in 2005 was enough to bring Brand to trial in 2026. When the authorities have been caught applying the law of sexual offences according to political convenience on so large a scale, they can hardly complain if the rest of us notice where their zeal has now been directed.

What a political prisoner is

The obvious objection is that a political prisoner is a man imprisoned for his opinions, and that Brand has been imprisoned for rape. That is too simple. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which nobody would accuse of indulgence towards conspiracy theorists, adopted a set of criteria in its Resolution 1900 of 2012. Among them is the case of a person detained for political motives in a manner that discriminates against him in comparison with others, and the case of a person whose detention results from proceedings that were clearly unfair where the unfairness appears connected with political motives. The criteria do not require that the prisoner be innocent. They recognise what every student of history already knows, which is that a government wishing to silence a critic will prefer a charge that has nothing to do with his politics, because such a charge silences him and discredits him at once.

Wilkes was guilty of obscene libel as the law then stood. The poem existed, he had caused it to be printed, and it was undoubtedly obscene. Nobody now supposes that this was why he was prosecuted. Julian Assange was held for years in connection with Swedish allegations of sexual misconduct on which he was never charged, and which were quietly abandoned in 2019 once they had served their purpose. Accusations of sexual impropriety have long been the most convenient weapon against an awkward man, since they require little evidence, they turn his supporters into apologists for vice, and they spare his enemies the inconvenience of answering his arguments.

I must face the strongest reply to all this, which is that if every dissident accused of a crime may claim to be persecuted, dissent becomes a form of immunity, and any woman unfortunate enough to be raped by a man with a podcast loses the protection of the law. This is a serious point, and I accept it. I do not say that the complaints against Brand should have been ignored, or that he should have been beyond the reach of the criminal law because his opinions were unpopular with the authorities. The remedy for selective prosecution is equal enforcement, not a general amnesty for the well connected. But the presumption that a prosecuting authority acts from a neutral concern for justice is one that it has to earn, and it can be forfeited. Where the State has shown by its conduct elsewhere that it enforces the law of sexual offences according to whose interests are at stake, the burden of dispelling the suspicion lies on the State, which created it, and not on the citizen who points it out.

I have no wish to share a dinner table with the man Russell Brand appears to have been in 2009, and I am not sure I should much enjoy one with the man he has since become. That is beside the point. The crowds that chanted for Wilkes and Liberty were not endorsing the Essay on Woman. They had understood what the ministry was doing, and they declined to be distracted by the sight of Lord Sandwich reciting filth with an expression of outraged virtue. I shall decline in the same way. Brand may well be as bad as the jury found, but I know what kind of State put him in the dock, and I know how differently it has behaved when the accused were men whose prosecution served no political purpose. I regard him, therefore, as a political prisoner, and I shall continue to do so until the Crown shows the same appetite for justice in Rotherham that it has shown in Southwark.