The Oxford-educated Jones is unclear on whether education at Oxbridge makes you a member of the establishment. Had he attended some other place of higher learning one suspects that it would have been clearer. The state-school-educated author is nonetheless certain that anyone who is privately educated is part of the establishment, unless they repent enough to hold precisely Jones's far-left politics. So the editor and author David Goodhart may be a lifelong left-winger, but he is dismissed as part of the establishment with a nod and a slur. The nod is that he is an Old Etonian, the slur is Jones's claim that Goodhart's "overriding passion appears to be an almost obsessive opposition to what he regards as mass immigration". This claim alone is sufficient for Jones to dismiss not just Goodhart but Demos, the left-wing think tank with which he is associated, as being "establishment".

Elsewhere in this paranoid parallel universe the Mont Pelerin Society is among the most powerful forces in the world. Jones says, "To understand the guiding principles of today's Establishment, we have to go back to 1947 and the sleepy Swiss village of Mont Pèlerin." How I wish the late Ken Minogue, who presided over this meeting group of free-market economists, were still with us to laugh at the vast political power he is now presumed to have had.

Jones in turn encourages his readers to laugh at the Mont Pelerin Society's 1947 claim that "over large stretches of the earth's surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared". He nowhere mentions that the main reason for this was that much of the earth's surface was at that point covered by the menace of Communism — an ideology which in a book devoted to some pretty obscure and unimportant corners receives not one mention. This is perhaps suitable in a work that elsewhere cites the crazed conspiracy theory website Spinwatch as a legitimate source.

By now it should be clear what type of politics we are dealing with here. For Jones "the establishment" is shorthand for people he does not like. People he does like are not establishment.

The same prejudice is, like everything else, even clearer in Brand's book. So whereas Jones is careful not to state his evident ambition (that Labour's leaders step aside and put control of the party into his uniquely authentic hands), Brand is less bothered with any track-covering. From the strange Rasputinesque cover photograph on, it is clear Brand does not wish to persuade: he wishes to convert. The result is unreadable; although Jones does not write well, when put alongside Brand he reads like Noel Annan.

Revolution is not just un-researched, ill-disciplined and meandering. It is, I would say, clearly the product of a drug-wrecked mind. Brand does sometimes swerve onto subjects other than himself. But whenever it happens he is careful to return as swiftly as possible to his chosen specialist subject. It is also quite amazingly puerile. This man, whose career ought to have ended when he used his position in the BBC establishment to taunt and demean the retired actor Andrew Sachs, remains especially (one might say unwisely) keen on dismissing people by reference to their physical appearance. One of his more printable efforts dismisses David Cameron, Donald Rumsfeld and Rupert Murdoch as having "dish face, dishrag, anodyne-plus appearances".