"Is there any escape from Russell Brand?" wondered Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. "He's everywhere, "peering out of my computer, preening across the television And what a mediocre, hypocritical, dancing, prancing and arrogant perm on a stick he is."
What have we done to deserve a man who has slept with 2,000 women "telling us what to think about politics"?
Interviewed on Newsnight about his new book, Revolution, he flew into a rage when Evan Davis showed him a chart showing that capitalism only made people richer. "This is the kind of thing people like you use to trick people like me," he shrieked. "Oh, I've got a graph, mate."
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Get 6 issues free
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
How depressing, says Long. Does Brand really think the "ordinary" people he claims to represent are "too lazy or too dim" to cope with graphs?
"Does he think they are dumb enough to swallow his bilge about absurd conspiracy theories, most notably the gold-plated loon's theory that the US government was responsible for destroying the twin towers?"
The Daily Mail's Stephen Glover was appalled by Davis's "pathetically unforensic interview" and the "rapturous reception" given Brand by The Guardian.
How did this man, whose previousbooks told stories of "his romps with prostitutes and his drug addiction", transform himself into "a serious thinker' and writer of pretentious and convoluted prose"?
"Oh dear, what a fusillade of hatred against poor old Brandy Wandy," says Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. He is denounced as a know-nothing narcissist who cheerfully admits he "can't get his head around economics". But why break a butterfly on a wheel?
First, much of the vituperation is "motivated by jealousy": of his success, his beautiful girlfriends, and so on. Second, he seems "like a nice chap". Third, he is "fantastic news for the Tory party".
In "fastening their attention on Russell and his semi-religious pseudo-economic mumbo-jumbo, [left-wingers] are revealing something very significant about modern politics the total failure of Ed Miliband's Labour Party to motivate or inspire".
Russell Brand may be about as convincing a political theorist as a toaster made by Russell Hobbs, but he's a sign of the disintegration of the left and therefore "needs every possible encouragement".
How interesting that Tony Benn left not a penny of his £5m-plus will to the Labour Party, the poor, or any of the radical causes he supported. Interesting, too, that he took what steps he could to reduce inheritance tax on his ancestral home in Essex and on his house in Holland Park.
Benn did nothing wrong, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. But he never seems to have considered that if his own political programme advocating, among other things, an end to all tax-avoidance schemes had been implemented, "it would have stopped other families doing for their children what he clearly wanted to do for his own".
Tabloid money: Red Ed resembles a fluffy barnacle goose chick
"Now it can be revealed," says Tony Parsons in The Sun. "Jos Manuel Barroso, the creepy European Commission president, is, without doubt, a Ukip mole. I can't think of anything more likely to make Brits want to quit the EU than telling us: Without the EU, you Brits are nothing.' Apart from asking us to pay an extra £1.7bn to the EU because our economy is doing well."
"I agree with Tony Labour is totally unelectable with Red Ed Miliband as leader," says Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun. "Our ex-PM understandably tweeted a denial, but the leaked version of his private thoughts is bang in line with most voters." They have never taken to "a man capable of knifing his own brother".
Labour MPs know they've picked a dud, so do the party's union paymasters. Even Neil Kinnock has gone off his protg. So thanks to Miliband, "and for all his self-inflicted wounds and ripe errors of judgement", Cameron is heading for a second term.
He "resembles a fluffy barnacle goose chick in David Attenborough's Life Story, hurling itself off a 400-foot cliff, bouncing off jagged rocks and landing dazed but chirping at the bottom".
"For once MPs have had a great idea (unusual I know)," says Carole Malone in the Sunday Mirror. "They want the millions generated in fines from those bankers who fiddled the Libor interest rate to be spent financing the pensions of 7,000 loyal Gurkhas.
These brave men laid their lives on the line for this country, but still they have no pension or support from us.This would be one way of making something good come out of something filthy and corrupt."
"Doctors are to be paid £55 per patient for diagnosing dementia," says Fiona Phillips in the Daily Mirror. Yes, dementia diagnosis rates are "appalling". But instead of spending £5m on improving diagnosis, we'd be better off putting the money into a "big pot for research" and trying to find a cure.
How does the Lifetime ISA work? Key LISA rules
AJ Bell: a fine British fintech going cheap
