Mr Brand is many things, few of them good. Rambling to the point of incoherence and self-satisfied to the point of obscenity, his wittering self-regard is quite hard for anyone over the age of 30 to understand, let alone stomach. But no matter how silly he is, there’s no denying Mr Brand is popular. His execrable book, Revolution, has been in Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers for the past four months. He has nine million followers on Twitter. When he films himself talking and uploads the results to YouTube, some are watched by more than two million people. On a good day, Newsnight is watched by 500,000.  Those YouTube millions are the potential audience for Mr Miliband’s slightly awkward, faintly bewildered appearance in Mr Brand’s large and expensive kitchen. It seems fair to guess they are young and not much engaged with conventional politics or journalism. Many of them may not even vote next week, partly because of their gibbering prophet’s advice not to bother.  Pay no attention to Mr Brand. He’s not what’s important here. What matters are the people watching him with Mr Miliband, people who wouldn’t normally give a politician 15 seconds of their skittish attention, never mind the 15 minutes of footage Mr Brand uploaded yesterday. Did Mr Miliband win many of them over, or any of them? It’s unclear, but at least he tried. He spoke to them, which at least gives him a chance to be heard by them. Those politicians who sneeringly refuse to engage with Mr Brand deny themselves that opportunity to talk to potential voters, and run the risk of looking like they hold those people in contempt. That would be a curious choice at any time, but during a razor-close election, it borders on self-harm.  Perhaps the best example of a political leader brave enough to embrace new media and new audiences remains Stanley Baldwin. In the Twenties, when his peers were focusing on grand oratory in the House of Commons, Baldwin was giving homely conversational talks on the radio. He took his wife, Lucy, to the studio, where she sat knitting as he spoke: Baldwin wanted a visual reminder that he was speaking to women in their homes, not politicians in Parliament.  Baldwin also set up the Conservative and Unionist Film Association and sent “daylight cinema vans” around the country, showing short newsreels to audiences hundreds strong and largely made up of “the unconverted working classes”. In response to Tory doubts about the project, one of his advisers explained that the films would reach “a section of the populace which no traditional means of publicity appeared effectively to reach”.  A better description of the people who follow Russell Brand today would be hard to find. Baldwin, meanwhile, was prime minister three times.  • For more about General Election 2015 delivered by email every morning, sign up for the Telegraph Politics newsletter here
Successful politicians have always found new ways to reach the electorate. So   how could the Labour leader ignore Brand's one million Youtube subscribers?