As with everything else with this type of politics, if one were to highlight an inconsistency among those who complain about politics being a vacuous beauty contest while simultaneously turning it into even more of a vacuous beauty contest, Brand has a way out. Being a "joker" as well as a full-time multi-millionaire revolutionary, Brand is capable of his own shape-shifting. If at one moment his concerns are those of ordinary people, the next he will be saying, "Don't ask me, I'm only a comedian."

During one recent interview for the BBC's Newsnight, Evan Davis tried to test one of Brand's claims by bringing up a graph. The interviewee instantly hollered: "I don't want to look at a graph, mate, I haven't got time to look at a bloody graph . . . This is the kind of thing that people like you use to confuse people like us." The interviewer was soon cowed into promising that he was in fact "trying to help" Brand. How politicians must dream of having a Newsnight interrogation like that.

This is one of the real problems with these new anti-establishment designer demagogues. They pose as the little men — the only legitimate voice of the people. But they are probably the most powerful people in our society, who expect never to be challenged by the media. When Brand was recently asked an inconvenient question by a Channel 4 interviewer he ended up seizing the journalist, intimidating him, calling him names, and ordering him to ask different questions. If you wonder what tone political interviewers now employ to speak to Brand, it is the one their predecessors once reserved for senior politicians. And while today's politicians are treated on the airwaves as liars whose untruths must be exposed, Brand is offered the "Is there anything else you would care to share with us?" soft-balls.

And there lies a clue to one of the things which is going on. We live in an inverted political order. Anybody who believes that politicians in the House of Commons are a uniquely powerful establishment which must be brought low cannot have been paying attention. Many people spend their entire lives working to become Members of Parliament. But when they get there they notice that they are in reality almost powerless. One simple cause for this observation may be the proliferation of other places of law-making, most noticeably Brussels, which render membership of the Commons far less meaningful than it was even 25 years ago. Meanwhile, the public have been persuaded — again not wholly without justification — that MPs are uniformly and uniquely corrupt. Our MPs are now less well paid than an average first-year lawyer at a London solicitors' firm. We have passed the point where the public wishes to punish their representatives. We are now at a stage where there may be something not just sadistic but anti-democratic about keeping hatred of powerless politicians at this pitch.

There is also something deeply troubling about where all this is heading. There are currently allegations of members of the UK's recent political "establishment" not only carrying out sexual abuse of children but of consorting to cover up such abuse. An inquiry into these historic allegations has been announced by the Home Secretary. It has got through two chairpersons before it has even started — both having been deemed by alleged victims to be part of the establishment they are meant to be looking into. Newspapers are now running front-page stories claiming that establishment paedophiles have even murdered their victims and covered up such murders with the help of the police. I have no idea whether such claims are true, though they strike me as unlikely. But in our current atmosphere of anti-establishment anti-politics such charges have the possibility of being not just widely expected to be true but to lead to ends which are profoundly dangerous.