Cant sculpt on a certain polygon mesh

For some reason with a certain polygonal mesh object, when I try to sculpt on it with the poly sculpt tools, on click drag, a marque rectangle selection is drawn rather than sculpting on the surface (verts moved).

This does not happen with other meshes, such as the default sphere object, or even a series of faces duplicate-extracted from the problematic mesh on to its own object, in these objects, sculpting works.

I have tried making new instances or copies of this problematic mesh, still when I sculpt I get a marquee selection. What could I be doing wrong here?

Please see this video for an example