In your briefing today:

📣 A judge attacked Russell Brand’s “staggering arrogance” as he jailed the former entertainer for 10 years, while praising his victims’ bravery and accusing the star of living “unhindered by the rules by which decent people live”.

Mr Justice Bennathan told Brand: “Whatever women wear, wherever they go, whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no and demand justice in the criminal courts when sexual predators like you, Mr Brand, act without their consent.” (Guardian)

📣 Edinburgh Airport’s arrivals experience is an “insult to a nation”, says former First Minister Henry McLeish, who also says returning home to Scotland via the airport is a “deeply depressing and embarrassing experience.” He’s calling on the airport’s management to use an ongoing major development programme to address the airport’s long-running problems. (Scotsman)

📣 Donald Trump says he believes the war in Iran “militarily is effectively over”, suggesting that - for now - he’s not wanting to resume the bombardment of the country, which has brought widespread repercussions for the global economy. Trump had suggested, before last week’s sweeping mid-term election defeat, that he was prepared for an escalation of hostilities with the Islamic Republic. (AP) (BBC)

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📣 Health Secretary Angela Constance says she’ll keep an “open mind” on putting Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in special measures, despite revelations that senior doctors think patient harm has become a “daily reality” in the hospital’s A&E department. (Herald)

📣 An NHS executive received a near £400,000 redundancy pay-off when she retired from a health board, it has been revealed. Mary Morgan, CEO of NHS National Service Scotland, left the NHS after a 44-year career in May. (BBC)

📣 Culture secretary Mairi McAllan will call for public service broadcasting to be devolved to Scotland today in a Holyrood debate, following BBC Scotland’s announcement of cuts. (Holyrood)

📣 It’s an affair which has “spiralled into a national security nightmare” and laid bare the “governance vacuum” at one of the world’s most valuable companies: Jensen Huang’s affair with a woman accused of spying for China has opened a Pandora’s box. (WSJ)

📣 Kemi Badenoch says the UK’s welfare bill is “crushing our economy” and is promising to cut £36 billion by restricting sickness and disability payments, as well as bringing back the two-child benefit cap. (Independent)

📣 Norway’s leader has urged Andy Burnham not do seek the Norway model of EU relationship: he says the countries’ two economies are too different. (Politico)

📣 It’s a right pea-souper… Londoners are being warned they face unusually high pollution today, as fog mixes with smoke still lingering from last weekend's fireworks and bonfires. (Guardian)

📣 The End of Everything, a “challenging” post-apocalyptic novel, has won this year’s Booker Prize. Author M John Harrison, 81, is the oldest-ever winner of the prize. (BBC)

⚽️ Aberdeen are on the hunt for a new manager, again, after Stephen Robinson was sacked last night. His final game in charge was a 4-0 drubbing by Hibernian, at home, on Saturday. The BBC reviews his unhappy time in charge, and takes the temperature of some fans. (BBC)

⚽️ Manchester United are expected to sack Michael Carrick, despite the stirring 4-4 comeback at the weekend, and his popularity with fans. He’s overseen the club’s worst league start in 40 years. (Guardian)

⚽️ Thomas Frank is expected to take over at Crystal Palace if - or when - Pierre Sage is shown the door. (Sky Sports)

🗣️ One of the questions left hanging in the air after Russell Brand’s conviction and sentencing for 10 years, six months, for rape and three sexual assaults was: how on earth did he get away with it for so long? Who knew, and why did they shelter him? How was this dreadful man so dreadful in plain sight without getting caught?

Because he certainly aroused suspicion. Writing in - of all places - Politics Home, the site’s Editor-in-Chief recalls investigating allegations that Brand was a rapist more than a decade ago.

Alan White is careful to immediately praise the work of Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace - the journalists “whose brave, diligent and sensitive work was responsible for getting justice for his victims”.

But he did know. Or, at least, have strong suspicions as far back as 2013, at a time when he was working as a jobbing freelance opinion writer. “It came from a single source, who had heard it from someone else, and that person didn’t want to go public,” he says. “Storywise, it was something of a dead end. I tried to find out more from people I thought might know, but drew a blank.”

And, to a fellow journalist, all that seems very plausible. We hear whispers about bad behaviour - not necessarily always sexual - from prominent people quite often: not all the time, thank goodness, but often enough. Standing those whispers up to the extent they could be published is very, very hard work. What you see in print or on your screen, at least in my experience, represents only the massively researched, carefully legalled and evidentially watertight tip of the iceberg.

It should be added: people also make stuff up. Some of it, at least as far as any journalist can tell, simply isn’t true, or is so madly exaggerated it adds up to little.

Even when multiple victims wants to speak, there’s not necessarily a story. Notes White: “A story which was, essentially, the complainant’s word against the alleged would not make it past the libel lawyers.”

Brand, though, had something more on his side. Katie Razzall, the BBC’s culture and media editor, points the finger at the early 21st-century “lad culture” as a culprit: the pre-”me too” world in which an on-stage persona of “insatiable, shameless womaniser” was fine - funny, indeed - when today we might view it as “deeply rooted misogyny dressed up as humour. But these were different times,” notes Razzall.

But this wasn’t just an on-stage persona: Brand also wrote about it in his book, My Booky Wook, hailed in an Observer review as “a scandalous, libidinous memoir that is better written and more entertaining than any number of celebrity autobiographies that clog the shelves”. What isn’t quoted by Razzall is the final, prophetic and I suspect quite deliberate final line of that review: “But you still wonder having read it: what will become of Russell Brand?” Now we know.

Sarah Ditum, author of Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, says he was a product of the time and its tolerances. People “are willing to mistake irony and self-awareness for truth-telling and trustworthiness,” Ditum tells Razzall. "The idea that he made these jokes about being this kind of sexual monster was supposed to convince you that he wasn't actually a sexual monster in real life."

Probably the best bit of writing I’ve read this week came from Camilla Long, of the Sunday Times, who sat in court to hear evidence during the trial. “To sit in court 3 at Southwark Crown Court, hearing how Brand grabbed, pushed, groped and degraded his victims, was one of the most disgusting experiences of my life,” she writes.

She offers little forgiveness towards those who hailed Brand in his prime: for the BBC commissioners who “elevated him to a position of serious thinker”, the columnists who hailed his left-wing politics (at the time - latterly he has been of the hard right).

Brand’s next move, she suggests, will to be to adopt a new pose: that of political prisoner. And he will find people willing to indulge him in that, too: already, the world’s richest man - Elon Musk - has tweeted how his sentence is “unjust”. And so it will, at some level, continue.

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