It sounds at first like what Donald Trump once called “locker room banter”. Just two guys, unwittingly taped having the kind of conversation that women always secretly worry men might be having behind their backs; the one where it doesn’t matter how bright or confident you are, because if necessary they can still just reduce you to meat. “Who’d want to shag that?” rages Laurence Fox, the fading actor turned failed political candidate, of a young political reporter called Ava Evans whose views on men’s mental health (expressed on the BBC) had apparently displeased him. His mate Dan Wootton, who may be vaguely familiar to you from allegations of sexual harassment currently being investigated by a previous employer, chuckles before noting that poor Evans is actually “very beautiful”. So maybe she is shaggable, after all? There’s editorial balance for you.
But it wasn’t a private locker room conversation, of course. It was a segment on GB News, the channel that says the quiet bit out loud, broadcast within days of all the public soul-searching about how Russell Brand got away with being openly misogynistic on the radio in the 00s. You can tell how far we’ve come since then because within hours, Wootton had issued an apologetic statement suggesting he was actually smirking in shock at his guest’s outburst. And you can tell how far we still have to go by the way Fox then published a private exchange of messages, purporting to show Wootton posting laughing emojis when talking about the programme. Both men are now suspended, pending investigation, which obviously couldn’t have happened to two nicer guys. Wootton was also sacked today by MailOnline, where he was a columnist. But hold the schadenfreude, because half the problem with GB News is the way it has been treated as a joke for too long.
True, it launched with such chaotic amateurishness that advertisers, viewers and its chairman Andrew Neil all swiftly deserted: at one point its breakfast show was overtaken in the ratings by Welsh-language episodes of the children’s programme Paw Patrol. Plenty of people, me included, thought it couldn’t survive haemorrhaging money.
But that was two years ago – before the worst of the technical hitches were ironed out and senior Conservative politicians including the former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and deputy chairman Lee Anderson took presenter gigs that offered a crucial air of legitimacy (the channel is likely to have a prominent platform at Conservative party conference). It still feels faintly like a spoof of real TV, with its ranting presenters and seemingly ever-present threat of a physical punch-up between the guests: you half expect Jeremy Kyle to materialise and demand somebody take a DNA test. But sometimes it’s challenging SkyNews for ratings now, while its owner, Sir Paul Marshall, is reportedly considering expanding the brand by bidding for the Telegraph newspaper group.
It’s precisely because it wasn’t initially taken seriously that GB News has got this far in building a new echo chamber for the populist right, rendered roughly compliant with broadcasting regulations by leftwing pundits’ puzzling willingness to go on its shows still (and thus help it tick the box for political balance). The night Fox and Wootton were suspended, the former Jeremy Corbyn adviser James Schneider joined Rees-Mogg and the former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie on air to discuss multiculturalism. Before them, the Reform party leader-cum- presenter Richard Tice had Zoe Cohen from Just Stop Oil on, whose opening salvo was a spirited plea for viewers not to believe “the misinformation you’re being fed” by GB News about fossil fuels. Tice took this good-humouredly, but why wouldn’t he? Stand-up rows make great knockabout telly, and so long as balance is defined as two ends of the spectrum mud-wrestling for the viewer’s entertainment, it’s balanced enough to keep Ofcom happy. Or at least, it has been.
For lately, a worryingly sleepy regulator seems to be waking up. Earlier this month it ruled that a show back in March, where the Tory MPs-cum-hosts Esther McVey and Philip Davies interviewed the Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt about his budget, was – brace yourself – not wholly impartial. Perhaps that intervention has had a chastening effect, judging by this week’s swift suspensions. But the GB News business model is surely still to say what the mainstream media daren’t and treat any backlash as a sign that the supposedly woke establishment is running scared, which by now should ring alarm bells. The lesson of the last few years is that what’s fringe today – like the insult “cucked little incel”, a phrase Laurence Fox used on-air, which was until recently confined to the darker corners of the internet – is normalised tomorrow, and that doesn’t stop at objectifying women.
If the Tories lose the next election, Rishi Sunak will probably be replaced by whoever offers Conservative members a comforting explanation for why they lost, which may well be that they didn’t go far enough on immigration or net zero. The Suella Braverman wing of the party is thus in pole position, and GB News is already out there rolling what may become the pitch, much as Fox News did for Trump. You might think it doesn’t matter what the Tories get up to in opposition, or that a hard-right leader would render them unelectable. But if conventional politics of either colour fails in tackling the existential economic and social challenges facing Britain over the next few years, then ultimately what’s left is the unconventional kind. Still laughing? Me neither.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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