Around 10pm on 27 April 2015, less than a fortnight before the general election of that year, a grainy photo found its way onto Twitter and caused a media sensation. 

It showed the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, getting into a car outside a house in Shoreditch, east London. What made the picture headline news was the owner of the property: one Russell Brand.

Once the photo had gone viral, it was quickly confirmed that the leader of the opposition had been snapped leaving Brand’s home after secretly recording an interview which a couple of days later would appear on the comedian’s YouTube channel.

At the time, Miliband’s circle were cock-a-hoop about the encounter and Brand’s subsequent endorsement, with Labour spinners seriously thinking that the intervention had the potential to swing the election.

‘They thought they’d nailed it’

A former BBC news executive who dealt with Miliband’s team during the campaign recalled to The i Paper: “Labour were constantly on the phone, telling me what a coup it was to get Brand. They thought they’d nailed it.”

Of course, just days after the interview it became clear that this was wishful thinking at best and laughably naïve at worst, with Labour slumping to its poorest general election result since 1987.

The strange episode might once have been viewed as merely a curio in the history of British politics. But it has taken on a different hue since multiple allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brand were reported by and Channel 4 in 2023.

On Thursday, those allegations came to a head with Brand being convicted of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. He is also being investigated by police over rape allegations from two more women.

His conviction has reopened questions about why Labour and Miliband – who is now the Foreign Secretary and one of Andy Burnham’s closest allies – decided to court Brand.

Burnham himself had shown support for Brand in December 2014 following a story about the comedian’s housing arrangements.

Burnham, who was an opposition frontbencher at the time, had posted on Twitter:  “Depressing to see media mission to discredit someone who stops playing their game & uses celebrity to help others. Keep going [Brand].”

Asked on Friday about Labour’s previous wooing of the comedian, the Prime Minister said: “All I can say is, I had no idea of the full extent of what he was doing or what he went on to do.

“His crimes are horrific. He’s rightly been held to account, justice for the victims and that is the right course that’s been taken here.”

He added: “It’s not always the case that people know everything about people in public life, but what is important is that where there is wrongdoing, it is exposed.”

What was known about Brand at the time

Both Miliband’s decision to meet Brand and Burnham’s supportive tweet came years before he was publicly accused of rape.

But even at the time, Brand was a highly controversial figure. In 2008, he was fired from various roles for a notorious Radio 2 transmission – which came to be known as “Sachsgate” – in which he and the broadcaster Jonathan Ross left a series of voicemails for the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs, boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter.

In his 2007 memoir, , Brand had written about how he had compiled a “victims’ list” of “the women I’ve wronged as a result of my sexual addiction”.

Although the book contains a number of lurid anecdotes which now appear shocking in light of his conviction, they did not cause a stir at the time. A period of perceived atonement also allowed him to bounce back from Sachgate, and by 2013 he was making forays into social and political commentary.

Brand, a former heroin addict, had dipped his toe into politics in 2012 when he gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee on drugs policy, and it was not long before he was being viewed as a serious thinker by at least some on the left.

He wrote op-eds for , guest-edited in 2013, and in 2014 appeared on BBC , trading barbs with Nigel Farage. It was during this phase that Brand started seriously registering on Labour radars.

In April 2013, Burnham – then shadow health secretary – took to Twitter to share a op-ed by Brand on the death of Margaret Thatcher, describing it as the “best thing ever written by a West Ham fan”.

‘It wasn’t a lunatic idea’

By the time of the 2015 general election, Brand was hosting a YouTube Channel, , which had accumulated millions of subscribers. It was his young audience – and his admission in a interview in 2013 that he had “never voted, never will” – which prompted Miliband to engage with him.

The details of how the interview was conceived remain murky. After the rape allegations against Brand appeared in 2023, published an account of the Miliband/Brand meeting which suggested that Lucy Powell, vice-chair of the 2015 Labour election campaign and now Labour’s deputy leader and Education Secretary, “brought the idea in”.

A source close to Powell disputed the idea that she had come up with the idea, telling The i Paper that Brand had approached the party about the interview.

As well as Powell, a number of other members of Miliband’s inner circle during the 2015 campaign now have senior roles in Burnham’s Government. For example, Torsten Bell, Miliband’s former policy director, is pensions minister, and another ex-adviser, Stewart Wood, is a peer and Foreign Office minister.

The rationale for the interview is not disputed: with young people much more likely to have left-wing views, but also less inclined to turnout, the hope was that Miliband’s tête-à-tête with Brand would open up a huge reservoir of previously untapped votes.

A Labour source told in 2023: “It wasn’t a lunatic idea to get someone who had a big following among young people to persuade them to vote and to vote Labour.”  

When the interview eventually aired, it showed the then Labour leader sitting in Brand’s kitchen, chewing the cud on topics such as Rupert Murdoch, banks and taking on vested interests.

In the days following the meeting, the Conservative prime minister David Cameron derided the encounter, labelling Brand a “joke”, but Miliband defended his decision. “I’ll engage with anyone, anyhow, to persuade more people to turn out and vote, and to vote Labour,” he told journalists.

No impact on the election result

Labour and many of the party’s supporters were delighted when a few days out from the election, they won Brand’s endorsement. columnist Owen Jones wrote a piece with a headline that was to become infamous in light of the eventual election result: “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried.”

However, the euphoria went much higher up Labour ranks. The BBC news executive recalled to The i Paper: “Labour spinners were incredibly excited and saw it as the endorsement they needed to get Miliband into No 10.”

In the event, Labour went backwards in the 2015 election – which took place on 7 May – falling from 256 seats to 232. While the party led the Tories among younger voters, subsequent analysis by Ipsos also found that there was “no significant increase in turnout among young people”, with 18 to 24-year-olds almost half as likely to vote as those aged 65 and above.

For his part, Brand had missed the deadline to put his name on the electoral register by the time he changed his mind, so could not vote anyway.

When the rape allegations broke years later, some of those involved in Labour’s 2015 campaign said Miliband had been wrong to do it. Ayesha Hazarika, a former Labour adviser is now a peer and works as a broadcaster, told the BBC that it had been “terrible decision”, blaming it on the fact that “there weren’t a lot of women in the room making these decisions”.

Miliband also said he regretted doing the interview. In September 2023, he told the BBC’s 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.”

A spokesman for Ed Miliband pointed to these comments and added: “These are horrific crimes that Russell Brand has been found guilty of and Ed’s profound sympathy is with the victims.”