Powell defends Brand and Miliband’s chinwag

Desperate Lucy Powell this morning scrambled to explain why she helped arrange an interview between Ed Miliband and Russell Brand in 2015. The Education Secretary, then Red Ed’s chief of staff, was challenged over the Labour leader’s cosy chat on Brand’s YouTube show, The Trews . Asked why it was ever able to take place, given Brand was already known to be ‘wrong with women’, Powell insisted she had not been dazzled by his glamour – and it seemed fine at the time.

She claimed: I have a very low threshold – I’ve got to say now and always have had through my career – a very low threshold for power hungry, arrogant, rude, sexual-predating men. You know that was true then as it is today. And what was known at the time is very different to what we know now. In an extraordinary rewriting of history, Powell added the excuse: ‘We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time.’

Mr S would love to hear more about the Education Secretary’s definition of a ‘low threshold’. Just two years earlier, Brand had joked that he had ‘raped someone’ and ‘killed her after’. He’d also taken it upon himself to make public comments about an interviewer’s cleavage the same year he met Powell’s allegedly low threshold. Honestly, how is it that so many on the left manage to apply such different standards to people who flatter their politics?

At least arch-leftie Kezia Dugdale, who was Scottish Labour leader at the time, had the humility to admit: ‘It was a big gamble for Ed Miliband … at the moment in that time, it felt like it was a risk worth taking.’ Education secretary Lucy Powell says if she and Ed Miliband had known what they know now they wouldn’t have done the interview with Russell Brand. The interview was in 2015 when Ed Miliband was Labour leader Lucy Powell was his chief of staff at the time. pic.twitter.com/UznhMd8sNB — Times Radio (@TimesRadio) November 10, 2026