It’s not often I am grateful for the witterings of Owen Jones, the fidgeting moralist-in-chief of the post-sex, post-class, post-truth left. But his arse-covering statement in response to the conviction of Russell Brand for rape was just so superbly revealing. It was a masterclass in unwitting self-damnation, a reputational suicide note wrapped in a perfunctory mea culpa. In a nutshell, Jones confesses that he willingly overlooked reports of Brand’s sexism because the man was useful for pushing leftist talking points. There it is: the rank opportunism and sheer amorality of the Brand cult that stank up 2010s England.

Jones and others on the bourgeois left have been getting it in the neck since Brand was convicted last Thursday and then sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in jail today. These are the people who cosied up to the cod-philosopher slimy shaman in the 2010s in the hope that some of his allure would rub off on their own naff politics. Like the staff of the New Statesman who posed with Brand in a Da Vinci-style Last Supper set-up, him playing Christ, them playing his goggle-eyed apostles. Or the staff at the Guardian, where Brand was invited to spit political gibberish at their morning conference as Alan Rusbriger and Co looked on in borderline erotic awe. Then there was Jones. He hailed Brand as the gravedigger of Toryism. He fluttered his lashes at him in front of a swarm of rapt Guardianistas.

So naturally, following the conviction of his erstwhile comrade, Jones put out a statement. It was a breathtakingly cynical exercise in damage control, equal parts cowardly retreat and accidental confession. ‘I’ve met Russell Brand twice (I think)’, Jones writes. Yes, and one of those times was to sing his praises at a huge middle-class Brand love-in. Jones neglects to mention that he also wrote columns lauding Brand as a leftish messiah and gifted him a blurb for his 2014 book Revolution, calling him ‘funny, full of charm and engaging’.

Then comes the slip, the moment Jones’s performative halo slides down and chokes him. He casually admits that even as he was penning those breathless panegyrics, he was aware of Brand’s history of misogyny. ‘I saw him as a crude means to reach disillusioned younger people with left-wing politics’, he writes. ‘As a result I was willing to overlook, or just not look into, his history of problematic behaviour / statements, including sexism.’ Willing to overlook. Is it possible Jones doesn’t understand the magnitude of what he is saying here? That in his mad dash to ritualistically cleanse his own conscience he didn’t clock that he is effectively saying that women’s dignity is a small thing to throw on the bonfire of brocialist opportunism?

What Jones’s statement confirms is that Brand is the Jimmy Savile of the liberal elite. He’s the pig whose sexist blather and misogynistic behaviour they were ‘willing to overlook’, just as their stiffer, posher forebears of the 1980s media establishment overlooked the tsunami of rumours about Savile. In both instances, a blind eye was turned in the name of the Greater Good. In Savile’s case, that ‘good’ was his charity work, his primetime ratings, his position as an elder statesman of BBC pop and his chuminess with royalty. In Brand’s case, it was his saucy leftism, his frisson of ‘revolution’ in an era of Cameroon Toryism, his sprinkling of debauchery at a tired BBC and his chuminess with the bourgeois press. The result was the same, though: female safety traded in for fleeting moral gain.

Jones is not alone. There are numerous reports and allegations that media bigwigs were ‘willing to overlook’ Brand’s comments and behaviour on the grounds that he was a cash cow, the great spicer-up of their bland output. It is alleged that as early as 2013, Channel 4 executives considered reducing the number of female production staff on Brand’s shows, so that they wouldn’t be victimised. The BBC failed to investigate Brand after he flashed his penis at a female member of staff in its LA offices in 2009. As Konstantin Kisin says, ‘the fact that Brand [was] a rapist’ was an ‘open secret’ in British comedy circles, yet little was done.

This is pure Savile territory. The wilfully blind might be different – younger, less stuffy and more ‘hip’ than the BBC suits who ignored whispers about Savile’s depravity. But their instinct was the same: to stare at their shoes as rumours swirled because their man was just too damn useful, whether because he was making gains for the crappy Labour left or money for TV execs. In both cases we witnessed the tyranny of the Greater Good – the horrors that can flow, or at least go under the radar, when elites prioritise riches or ideology over decency.

We see the barbarism of the Greater Good everywhere. Consider the rape-gang scandal, where the authorities blithely sacrificed thousands of working-class girls to protect the sacred ‘good’ of multiculturalism. Such was their devotion to the neo-religion of diversity that they came to see even rape as a small price to pay for the preservation of their ‘progressive’ gospel. Or consider the trans hysteria, where women and girls have been knowingly endangered for the ‘good’ of the genderfluid lunacy, of never upsetting the fat fella in a boob tube who thinks he’s a woman. Indeed, why would the liberal elite be fussed about Brand’s indecent exposure when they openly support the ‘right’ of men in skirts to display their dicks in women’s changing rooms? Under the Greater Good of the trans ideology, flashing is not only permitted but celebrated.

Some are saying Brand is the victim of a #MeToo-style witch hunt. This is ideological blindness, too. As great feminists like Katie Roiphe argued, #MeToo went wrong when it turned from a righteous search for criminal behaviour – like Harvey Weinstein’s – into a blanket denunciation of men who were just bad at dating or crude in how they spoke. But there were criminals, there were violent misogynists. And having followed the Brand case, I am convinced he is one of them. No, not all men are wrong’uns – but the ones who flash their knobs at women, grab women’s breasts and ‘jokingly’ say ‘I raped someone once’ most definitely are. The question is why Brand’s army of bourgeois fluffers were so determined not to see it.