Katie Hopkins: Russell Brand issues emotional plea for people to treat The Sun columnist with compassion

He compared her to Heinrich Himmler and "an evil Nostradamus", but Russell Brand has issued a plea for people to treat Katie Hopkins with the compassion she has denied to others.

Speaking on his YouTube channel The Trews, Brand said: "The only option is to treat her compassionately, we can’t look at her the way she looks at immigrants, as some sort of weird, disgusting cockroach thing that’s dispensable and should be crushed.

"What we should do is be really loving to her because anyone who talks like that is in pain," Brand said. "We’re in a sick society in which there’s a huge deficit of love."

The Society of Black Lawyers has reported Hopkins and The Sun editor David Dinsmore to the Metropolitan Police for incitement to racial hatred.

"A notable psychological and ideological compatriot of Katie Hopkins is Himmler – remember, from the Nazis? He said that Jews are bed bugs and rats and it was the duty of mankind to extinguish them," Brand argued. "And when Katie Hopkins says we should have gunboats repelling immigrants she is expressing a comparable mentality."

Brand, a one-time Sun columnist who has fallen out with the paper in recent years, has endorsed the petition to remove Hopkins as a writer for the tabloid. He has, however, stressed the importance of compassion.

"Katie, please. Come back to humanity," he begged. "I don’t think there’s any point in condemning her, or trying to silence her, or anything. I think just acknowledge that that is a mentality. Not only that, it’s not an extremist one if you take policy. It’s just someone describing what’s happening. It’s not her fault at all, she’s just the pus emerging from the pimple of our policy."

He went on: "If compassion is not a component, then there’s no humanity left to save. Once we kill the compassion in ourselves, we are all then cockroaches, waiting for the apocalypse, and it can’t come quickly enough.

"What you can do is find your own humanity, look for the humanity and connection you feel for other people and be kind."

Hopkins declined to comment when approached by The Independent.