The megalomaniac and the narcissist: Two men whose influence you couldn't escape in 2013 By Max Hastings You don't need to love Amazon's power-crazed founder Jeff Bezos to gasp at his genius Hands up everybody who wants their local High Street shops to be filled and flourishing. What, all of you? Now, hands up everybody who has ever bought anything from Amazon. Yes, most of you. Or rather us, because I am at it, too. Yet each time we 'one-click' shop, we drive a nail into the heart of the High Street. And in 2013, we did this more often than ever before. We cannot help ourselves. The graph of online shopping is soaring upwards. For good or ill, we are contributing to the most dramatic upheaval of consumer habits since America's Sears Roebuck invented mail order in 1893. Much of this is down to one man â€" genius or monster according to taste (and probably, like most revolutionaries, something of both). In 1994, Jeff Bezos, a 30-year-old Wall Street geek with ambitions that made Napoleon's seem modest, read a report predicting potential web growth of 2,300â€‰per cent, and decided that he wanted some of it. Power mad: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during an event to release the Kindle Fire HD tablet in Santa Monica, California He quit New York and drove west across the U.S. almost until he reached the Pacific, devising a business plan for a putative internet selling start-up as he went. He chose the name Amazon because it sounded wild and exotic â€" and since it figured near the top of the alphabet, it would also come close to the head of any index. He studied a list of products that lent themselves to computer order and mailbox delivery, and decided to start with books. The business that began in Bezos's garage in Seattle, Washington state, now occupies 14 buildings in the same city. The 'everything store' can claim to be the largest on Earth, with hundreds of millions of customers, and still soaring. Its founder and overlord is reckoned to be worth Â£20 billion. Even if that guesstimate is a few billions adrift, we know that last August he was able to write a cheque for Â£160â€‰million from petty cash to buy the Washington Post newspaper. Amazon now sells or acts as a clearing house for hundreds of thousands of products manufactured by a huge range of businesses, many of which hate the terrifying market dominance that Bezos is building but cannot afford to stay away from his door. Until the 20th century, the world experienced just three radical transformations, created by the smelting of metals, the adoption of agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution. Since the late Victorian era, however, innovation has become relentless, enriching but also bewildering: electricity, the internal combustion engine, powered flight, synthetic polymers, nuclear power and weapons, the conquest of space, lasers, computers, the internet, to name but a few. To that list we should now add the Amazon revolution, which is changing our way of shopping â€" among the foremost of all human activities in consumer societies. Many of us buy this, that and the other at corner or village stores, spending a few pounds to satisfy troubled consciences about our commitment to local business. But tens of millions of shoppers have become Amazon junkies, hitting that one-click button with the same guilty compulsion as if they were ordering another drink. Jeff Bezos, founder and overlord of Amazon.com, is reckoned to be worth Â£20 billion A friend said at Christmas lunch: 'We do it because we can' â€" and she is right. No trudge in the rain, no 'we don't do your size, madam' or 'we're out of the stock'. No nervous surrender of credit card details to some unknown online vendor. We simply hit that single button â€¦ and behold, within days or even hours, the product drops on the doorstep. It is black magic. So thank you, thank you Jeff Bezos. Or maybe not? More than a few people out there, not all of them rivals, brand him a secretive, domination-fixated control freak. There have also been claims that warehouse staff are worked 'to the bone'. The company's goods-return policy seems shifty: my wife raged last month when she had herself to pay the postage to send back a wrongly-delivered item. Many industries â€" book publishing prominent among them â€" tremble before the near-monopoly Bezos is building, forcing the closure of hundreds of bookshops through ruthless discounting policies. Critics say that when Amazon gets to rule the world, or at least our shopping world, we shall be sorry. Bezos could defend himself by saying: 'This is the way it has always been with innovators. Nobody in old-world businesses ever liked new ones. Two centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution transformed society as steam supplanted sail and horsepower, and factory manufacture swept away cottage industries. The men who inspired that vast upheaval are today celebrated as heroes. But in their day, those same men were cursed by almost as many people as applauded them. In some districts, workers in old industries, seeing their livelihoods vanish, rioted and launched campaigns of 'machine-breaking', which obliged the government to turn out the Army. Admirals complained in deadly earnest that building steamships dependent on expendable coal rather than inexhaustible wind would spell disaster for the Navy. Revolutionaries are seldom congenial social animals, and we should thus be unsurprised that Jeff Bezos is not much like the rest of us. He was born almost 50 years ago in New Mexico. His natural father skipped the household a few months after his son's birth, and they've had little contact since. Jeff was adopted by his Cuban immigrant stepfather, while spending part of his childhood on his maternal grandparents' Texas ranch. As an 18-year-old high school graduate in Florida, Bezos was interviewed by a local newspaper. He announced that he wanted to make a career building space hotels. So he was thinking big even then. He kept doing so through the Ivy League's Princeton university and a successful youthful career on Wall Street. Today, space remains a Bezos preoccupation: he spends some of his millions on promoting orbital passenger travel schemes, which he has discussed with Richard Branson. He has kept the same wife, named MacKenzie, for 20 years, and has four children. He seldom gives interviews â€" not even to the Washington Post when he bought it â€" and runs a notoriously secretive business. Amazon never discusses future ideas: it merely explodes them into the marketplace on fine sunny mornings. There is much bitterness among retailers about the company's ability to escape American states' sales taxes, and about the pitiful percentage of Amazon's multi-billion turnover which brings significant tax money into host nations' treasuries, including that of Britain. Bezos is a typical new age tycoon who has tentacles everywhere but acknowledges loyalty nowhere. Some disaffected former employees complain that he is a tyrant who declines to delegate, intervenes in everything, micro-manages as obsessively as did the late Steve Jobs, boss of Apple. But it is probably no coincidence that a Business Review poll of executives found that Bezos ranks second only to Jobs as the corporate chief executive they have most respected in recent times. How can one not admire the man's steel nerve? He started the business declaring that he expected no profit for years, then weathered successive downturns and recessions in which Amazon's demise was widely predicted. He predicted soon after his start-up that if the company did moderately well, by 2000 it would turn over Â£46 million. In reality it turned over more than Â£1billion â€" but made a loss almost that big. Bezos invests and expands relentlessly, way ahead of his profit curve. The company constantly introduces new services and products. Consider the 2007 creation of Kindle, by far the most successful electronic book reader on the market, a boon to millions, and indeed to authors like me. Bezos's only conspicuous recent failure was a 1999 attempt to create an online sale business to compete with eBay. In 1851, the journalist Henry Mayhew published a legendary collection of interviews with working people under the heading London Labour And The London Poor. Many of his pieces were about men pursuing dying activities. One of my own favourites is one of those who used to drive the 'night carts' through the city's streets, collecting each house's human waste. This old boy (who had himself become a pumpman) moaned about being displaced by the new sewer system: 'There's so many new dodges comes up, always someone of the working classes is a being ruined. If it ain't steam, it's something else knocks the bread out of their mouths quite as quick.' Throughout history, a host of commercial activities have been displaced by innovation and technology. There is no prospect that, in our own time, Jeff Bezos and his kind will cause shopkeepers to disappear absolutely. There will always be a demand by consumers physically to inspect many kinds of goods we want to purchase, especially clothes, and for high-end establishments. But thousands of empty shopfronts up and down the land testify to the manner in which online selling â€" together with, of course, supermarkets â€" is changing our society. Nothing is for ever â€" and that probably includes Amazon. Bezos has imitators, and will have more. Just as his company has risen from nothing to global might inside 20 years, so it will almost certainly be supplanted within a generation by a new wave of hungry, ruthless, brilliant innovators â€" because that is the way of the world. For now, however, if Amazon does not quite rule the world, it has assuredly altered our retail universe, much to the advantage of shoppers. It is unnecessary to love Jeff Bezos to gasp at his genius. Nobody personifies the shallowness of modern Britain better than the preposterous Russell Brand Thousands of years ago, so the Bible records, a line of prophets emerged from among the people of Israel. Often men of great learning, the prophets spoke with the voice of God. In blistering, often controversial speeches, they savaged the sins and hypocrisies of their leaders. And in their spiritual wisdom, they laid down a path for society to follow. The days of the prophets are long gone, but society continues to throw up seers and spokesmen. The Victorians had great critics such as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. In the first half of the 20th century, men and women lapped up the words of Hâ€‰G Wells and George Bernard Shaw. So who is our equivalent? To whom will historians look when they discuss the great minds of Britain in 2013? Narcissist: Russell Brand performs to a sold-out crowd at Maslak Tim Center on his The Messiah Complex comedy tour There is an obvious candidate. Like the prophets of old, Russell Brand has long hair and a straggly beard. But there, I am afraid, the resemblance ends. Even a few years ago, few people had heard of Mr Brand. Born in Grays, Essex, in 1975, this aspiring stand-up comedian would have seemed an unlikely candidate to become a nation's self-appointed spiritual guide. Yet in the past 12 months, Russell Brand has stepped forward as Britain's moral judge and political arbiter. Invited to the GQ awards â€" which future historians will surely see as some kind of primitive religious ritual â€" he denounced the sponsors, Hugo Boss, for their dealings with the Nazis in the 1940s, and was promptly thrown out. Some theological experts saw parallels with the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, who also dared to stand up to the establishment and was thrown into a cistern for his pains. But Russell Brand's fate was rather different. He was invited to guest-edit the New Statesman. Russell Brand is spotted trying to avoid being photographed with glamour model Sophie Coady while leaving the Love Shake pub in East London This fine old magazine â€" celebrating its centenary in 2013 â€" was once graced by writers such as Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot and George Orwell. Now, with a keen eye on its circulation, it turned to a man who was once sacked by MTV for coming into work the day after the September 11 attacks dressed as Osama bin Laden. The result, a 4,500-word screed calling for a political and ethical revolution, was greeted with derision and bafflement in households across the country. By comparison, even the most obscure, heavily metaphorical language of the Old Testament prophets seemed a model of clarity. But perhaps Mr Brand, like his predecessors, was in touch with forces beyond the reach of ordinary mortals like you and me. How else, after all, can you explain his demand for a 'total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system'? Or, indeed, his impenetrable claim that 'the model of pre-Christian man has fulfilled its simian objectives .â€‰.â€‰. now this version of man must be sacrificed that we can evolve beyond the reaches of the ape'? There is, of course, an alternative explanation: that Mr Brand is a strutting narcissist, who, despite having no idea what he is talking about, has succeeded in fooling middle-aged metropolitan types who really should know better. The BBC invited him onto Newsnight â€" once a forum for serious politicians but now something of a pantomime. Meanwhile the show's new editor, the former Guardian journalist Ian Katz, was caught dismissing Labour's rising star Rachel Reeves as 'boring snoring' â€" presumably because she actually wanted to talk about policy, rather than ranting about revolution. Such is the environment in which characters like Mr Brand flourish. The really interesting question, though, is why Russell Brand's peculiar effusions struck such a chord. Why did the New Statesman's online circulation shoot through the roof after they published his ridiculous rant? And what did it say about Britain in 2013 that this preposterous man was rarely out of the headlines? The truth is that if Mr Brand did not exist, we would have to invent him. No single individual better captures the vanity and self-absorption of British life in the early 21st century, and no one better personifies the way in which our moral culture has completely changed. His entire career, after all, has been marked by his devotion to that holy trinity of the Sixties counter-culture: sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. In an earlier age, he might have been embarrassed by his wretched academic record. In a sign of things to come, he was thrown out of the prestigious private Italia Conti theatrical school for drug abuse, his place having been funded by the ratepayers of Essex. Instead, he incorporated this and other misadventures â€" including his addiction to cannabis, cocaine and heroin â€" into his stage act. Brand at the GQ Men of the Year Awards held at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London And while earlier comedians might have been even a tiny bit ashamed of their sexual incontinence, Mr Brand positively glories in his promiscuity. It is telling, too, that his most famous exploit remains his unpleasant phone call to the veteran actor Andrew Sachs, bragging about his conquest of Mr Sachs's granddaughter. I know people who still cannot understand what all the fuss was about, who can see nothing wrong with humiliating a pensioner on air, and think the incident hilarious. That tells me there is something wrong with their moral compass. Of course, bad boys have always been popular. But perhaps only Mr Brand could have written a bestselling autobiography entitled My Booky Wook â€" his choice of title accurately reflecting the infantilism of the age. What catapulted him into a new dimension, however, was his call to revolution. Most sane people thought it shamelessly irresponsible, and another comedian, the Peep Show star Robert Webb, wrote a scathing reply in the New Statesman, reminding Brand that revolution inevitably 'ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder'. Of course, comedians have every right to voice their opinions, but I wonder what historians will make of the fact that political debates in 2013 were often led not by politicians but by actors, stand-ups and sitcom stars, including Hacked Off's self-appointed spokesmen Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan. What does that say about the effectiveness of our politicians â€" or about the political and moral seriousness of the rest of us? In one way, of course, Russell Brand's prominence is merely a lamentable off-shoot of the cult of celebrity. Most of us have never seen him on stage, seen him presenting Big Brother's Big Mouth, or watched him in the ghastly St Trinian's remake. He is famous simply because he is famous, and he is cashing in while he can. Indeed, Mr Brand's wealth, which stands at an estimated Â£10â€‰million, casts his revolutionary credentials in an altogether different light. He may see himself as a champion of the common man, yet only two months ago he reportedly spent a small fortune on a mansion in the Hollywood Hills â€" a house that once belonged to, of all people, Sir Laurence Olivier. Above all, though, this strange man is the walking embodiment of contemporary Britain's political alienation. He strikes a chord with young people who feel abandoned by our modern political class, and who believe â€" not without reason â€" that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband neither understand their problems nor care about offering solutions. Of course it is easy to knock our politicians â€" especially when you hear that they are contemplating giving themselves a whopping 11 per cent pay rise. Too many of them have no experience outside politics; too many have come straight from public school and Oxbridge. But when I hear Russell Brand railing against them, I wonder whether the fault also lies with the rest of us. Eroded by television, video games and the internet, our attention span has declined to the point where we no longer listen to serious political discussions. Instead, too many people prefer Mr Brand's noxious anti-Establishment cliches and his lazy appeals to some vague revolution. He is, in other words, our equivalent of Beppe Grillo, the former Italian comedian who mounted a stunningly effective challenge to Italy's established parties in February's elections. Like Mr Brand, Mr Grillo is a rich man, owning both a sports car and a speedboat. And like Mr Brand, he offered nothing constructive at all. The German paper Der Spiegel, remembering the demagogues of decades past, even called him 'the most dangerous man in Europe'. Yet Mr Grillo's childish negativity appealed to voters who were sick of economic austerity and tired of the compromises of grown-up political life. Almost unbelievably, his party won one in four Italian votes. You may well say to yourself that such a thing could never happen here. But can any of us really be so sure? The thought of Mr Brand following a similar course and plunging into politics ahead of the 2015 election is as unpalatable as it is unlikely. But the days when such things never happened in Britain are, alas, long gone. The very fact that Mr Brand dominated the headlines in 2013 is a sign that, deep in our national soul, something has changed. And depressing as it may sound, it may be that nothing is beyond him.