Television has been as negligent. I would not mind the airtime the broadcasters on BBC Newsnight and Start the Week have given Brand if its interviewers had presented him with the same detailed, contemptuous questions they fire at politicians. Instead, they revealed a dismal double standard.

Broadcasters, print journalists and the ever-growing army of voyeurs on social media have cramped the space for conventional politics. They turn minor mistakes or jokes into "gaffes" — Freudian slips that allegedly reveal a politician's true perverted ideas, although more often than not they reveal nothing at all. A gaffe will have a "gate" added to it within seconds and will fill the news schedules for 36 hours. All forms of news media pay obsessive attention to the character and faults of party leaders, which ignores the collective nature of governments in parliamentary democracies. (Whether a man is "strong" or "gets it" is a simple story the viewers can grasp, they reason, as they elevate a pale 21st-century version of the Führerprinzip.) They refuse to let politicians speak at length without interruption — and then, without a blush of shame, complain that politicians speak in soundbites. They treat disagreements as "splits" — regardless of whether they are or not — and complain, again unblushingly, that politicians have become boring.

To try to keep an audience, which understandably has lost interest, television fills the hole where politics ought to be with celebrities, usually comedians, or "refreshing" politicians such as George Galloway and Nigel Farage. Broadcasters never apply to them the standards they apply to conventional politicians.

They do not mind that your average comedian on Have I Got News for You has no ideas beyond one-liners or that Galloway and Farage are ugly extremists. They are outrageous and "fun" and can hold the wavering audience's attention. Newsnight, a supposedly serious current affairs programme, never exposed Russell Brand. Nor did it wish to. Like an old man swallowing Viagra, it wanted him to boost its limp ratings and revive its flagging appeal. You can hide on a television show, but you cannot hide in a 100,000-word book. If your thought is vacuous, it will reveal your vacuity, however much gibbering you deploy to conceal it.

Revolution is so bad it has finished Brand's political career, such as it was. But  he will move on and the celebrity system which puffed him up will remain: anti-intellectual, anti-democratic because it shuts out real argument, incurious and dishonest. No good can come from it for Left or Right.