The education secretary has admitted she ‘really regrets’ Ed Miliband’s interview with Russell Brand in 2015 – but said it was a ‘different era’ when rumours about the comedian’s behaviour were less easy to find.
Lucy Powell worked as Miliband’s chief of staff during his time as Labour leader, and played a prominent role in the party’s general election that year.
Just over a week before voters went to the polls, Brand – then styling himself as a voice for those disaffected with politics – posted the 15-minute interview on his YouTube channel.
The bizarre encounter featured Brand swigging from a glass bottle of water as the pair debated the role of politics and politicians with lit candles on a kitchen worktop behind them.
Miliband – wearing a suit and tie, in contrast to the host’s grey sweater and incredibly long bead necklace – repeatedly responded to Brand’s verbose rants by telling him they were ‘totally wrong’ and ‘just not true’.
The video drew massive attention from the media and public, and it currently has around 1.4 million views on the social media site.
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But following Brand’s conviction for rape and a number of sexual assaults last week, Powell said she regretted her role in setting it up.
She told Sky News today that if she or Miliband had any idea Brand was a sexual predator, ‘that interview I’m sure would not have happened, history would have been very, very, different’.
She added: ‘Those things unfortunately, weren’t known at the time.
‘But I think, like anybody who paid to go to his show or watched him on TV, or who was his employer at the time, who had interactions with him, anybody – including those of us who were involved in that at the time – would look back and really regret that, knowing today what we now know.’
Miliband himself voiced regret for the interview in 2023, when allegations about the Forgetting Sarah Marshall star’s behaviour started to emerge in the media.
He told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Russell Brand was rather notoriously going round saying people shouldn’t vote because voting made no difference.
‘That’s why I did an interview with him, because I wanted to get to the people who he was influencing to say voting does make a difference.
‘But of course, knowing what I know now – and I was not aware of these allegations at the time about Russell Brand – I wouldn’t have done that interview and I regret doing it.’
The interview took place seven years after Brand was sacked from his BBC Radio 2 show over a vulgar radio prank targeting Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs and mere months after he had called shadow chancellor Ed Balls a ‘clicky-wristed snidey c***’ on a TV show.
Yesterday, he was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison after being found guilty of raping a woman in 2009 and three counts of sexual assault between 2004 and 2009.
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