‘Tonight I’ll be asking the most important question of all – who was St George and why do we celebrate him?” Supposing a UK channel wanted to prove that politicians make such abysmal current affairs presenters that there is nothing for regulators to worry about, it could hardly do better than hire Jacob Rees-Mogg.
After a year presenting State of the Nation on GB News, its presenter comes across, oddly on a station that increasingly betrays some interest in professional standards, as fully as unendurable as he was in the days when, as a cabinet minister, he’d leave crested notes on civil service work stations. “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish, Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg MP.”
Today, Somerset constituents hoping for a glimpse of the Rt Hon Jacob can be confident of seeing him four nights a week on telly, a deal paying over £29,000 a month. A top theme, last week, was underage drinking in the UK, the World Health Organization’s concern allowing him to advocate, reflexively, giving kids the occasional “sip of champagne”. “Oh, and it has biblical sanction,” said Rees-Mogg, showing he’s lost none of the playful sanctimony that once beguiled the BBC. “After all, Jesus Christ our lord and saviour turned water into wine, not orange juice, soy milk, or any other beverage without alcohol in it.”
Why would anyone, recalling Jesus Christ’s recommendations on hypocrisy, whited sepulchres, who “enlarge the borders of their garments”, not at this point switch him off, if only out of piety?
If anything, a year at GB News seems to have made him more ghastly: the familiar, drawling condescension has been refreshed with some demotic touches – “wet wipe of the week” – possibly reflecting some private awareness of a potentially less Mogg-friendly future when a top hat, nanny and Bentley are no longer hailed as indicators of distinction. Even without his side hustle, national polling has pointed to eviction.
If it’s fanciful to conclude from Rees-Mogg’s repellent genius that programme-makers must have hired this politician specifically – in a more tasteful variation on Springtime for Hitler in The Producers – for that reason, it won’t have harmed GB News’ campaign to overturn received ideas about broadcast impartiality.
And if his performance does attract the less Moggphobic, then, thanks to the new look at Ofcom, the industry’s putative regulator, his future as a politician-presenter of news and current affairs now looks secure. At least until he is outshone by fellow hire Boris Johnson, advertised as playing a “key role” in GB News’ election coverage, or indeed any other Tory or Reform politician apparently licensed, thanks to Ofcom’s timely clarification, to combine pre-election party efforts with (provided they are not standing) political presenting on GB News.
A standing politician-presenter, Reform’s Lee Anderson, say, could still be interviewed by a non-candidate presenter such as Reform’s Richard Tice, Anderson’s party leader.
That the forthcoming campaigning and presenting may appear, to the lay viewer, indistinguishable, could resemble a direct gift from Ofcom to the Conservative and Reform parties, given official limits to election spending and the fact that GB News’ slogan “the people’s channel” only really works if you don’t think non-rightwing viewers are people. A Guardian report found, comparing payments since its launch, that £660,000 had gone to Tory MPs, £1,100 to (two) Labour ones.
Last week, representatives of Ofcom effectively confirmed what its tolerance of rule-breaking by GB News has long suggested: Ofwat is not the only regulator suffering a kind of existential breakdown. And even Ofwat has yet to ask focus groups on whether they’re for, or against, sewage. Ofcom, however, sought advice from 29 focus groups before issuing its new pre-election advice on impartiality. Yes, participants confirmed, they were against politicians as news presenters, but “concern” about current affairs fell short – we’re told, no figures supplied – of justifying a ban. As Professor Stewart Purvis has argued, news content is not, as much as Ofcom acts like it is, separable from current affairs. Rees-Mogg’s show opens with him reciting, at a desk, a tendentious news list against a backdrop of Big Ben, with banner headlines and a news ticker all indicative, to many viewers, of news content.
Viewers, Ofcom reports, “thought they could easily distinguish between news and current affairs programmes in principle but struggled to consistently do so in practice”. So Ofcom appears, at best inexplicably, to be ignoring its own research in allowing the industry to continue exploiting the confusion. Parts of the industry, that is. Ofcom’s latest advice liberates competitors to the BBC’s news and current affairs output from impartiality considerations which, were they to be ignored by the national broadcaster, would instantly provoke attacks on the licence fee.
Ofcom’s chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, insisted on Radio 4’s Today programme that programmers had better watch out on impartiality (“you know, people do need to take care”), though it was perfectly obvious that they might as well not bother. It wasn’t just that GB News, after 11 breaches of the broadcasting code, has escaped fines and sanctions.
Higher principles than news broadcasting impartiality are at stake. “I don’t think,” Dame Dawes said, “we want a regulator that is very prescriptive, that yes and no you cannot do that, that starts to get towards censorship; what we want is creativity, freedom of expression, a diverse broadcasting landscape.”
Though by no means a direct rebuke to PEN and other free speech champions, there are potential learnings here. Shouldn’t they be trying harder to protect GB News creatives like Rees-Mogg, Anderson, Nigel Farage, Tice and, soon, Johnson from, if it’s not an end to MP moonlighting, the ever-present threat of a less gullible successor to Ofcom’s Dawes? Of course, next time they’re on screen, you are welcome to send any or all of them a message of hope.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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