Sam Leith Sam Leith

Impossible to dislike

In 1968, when he was still a student at Oxford, Gyles Brandreth was interviewed in the Sun.

In 1968, when he was still a student at Oxford, Gyles Brandreth was interviewed in the Sun. The headline was a quote from him: ‘I’d like to be a sort of Danny Kaye and then Home Secretary.’ It’s about bang on. He achieved the first, rather than the second, and the fact that it never occurred to him that he couldn’t do both is what’s great about him.

He’s a very clever fellow and a colossal show-off. He is all over Isis, and the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Dramatic Society within weeks of starting university, not to mention selling fabricated diary stories about himself and arranging to be followed around by TV crews wherever he goes.

What marks him out from the usual publicity crazed Oxbridge overachiever is that he lacks pomposity to such an extent that he really can’t tell the difference between Home Secretary and Danny Kaye. This makes him, for my money, more appealing than the ones who are set with cold-eyed ambition on being either. He’s a warmer and more guileless version of Boris Johnson, a smarter and less crooked version of Jeffrey Archer, a cuddlier and less punk-rock version of Bungle from Rainbow.

I started making a list of cherishably ridiculous sentences I might include in this review, and going back to it I find there’s barely room for half of them. These are sentences where you laugh at Brandreth — of course — but laugh with him too:

The Nobel Prizes have been announced and I have been overlooked again. But, look on the bright side: this morning at TV-am I did my stuff as the Joke Correspondent on the Wide-Awake Club and then, as NFPA Appeals Chairman, I masterminded the World’s Biggest Cracker Chain Pull in Trafalgar Square.

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