What is the most shudder-inducing tabloid tone? I think it’s probably fake sympathy. Let’s see a master of it at work. “Danny Dyer’s friends fear he could be ‘heading down the path to sex addiction’,” sympathised Dan Wootton in the Sun in 2017. The next year, pals were fearing again – this time the possibility that the late Caroline Flack might reunite with a boyfriend. “Friends fear she is preparing to give their relationship another go,” commiserated Dan. An unnamed friend apparently told him: “Nobody wants to see her hurt.” A year after that, Dan voices “fears for Ricky Hatton” after the boxer is filmed stumbling in Tenerife. A fan supposedly tells Dan: “What a fall from grace for such a great champion.”
And so to this week’s revelations, after a Byline Times story alleged Wootton offered current and former Sun colleagues large sums of money under a pseudonym in return for sexual material. The Guardian newspaper has spoken to seven such individuals, who say they were contacted by a man named Martin Branning. (Though Wootton has not denied the allegation that he was “Branning”, the Guardian has not been able to independently establish the link between Wootton and Branning. Wootton’s lawyers have, however, made a legal complaint to Byline Times’s publisher.)
Anyhow. Pals fear the GB News presenter and MailOnline columnist could be on the brink of karmageddon after a nutso opening monologue to his show on Tuesday night. For all the seriousness of the “unspeakable” criminal allegations, at which Wootton only vaguely gestured in the course of denying them categorically, this monologue was in many ways the most mesmerisingly peculiar six minutes of TV this year. They should show it at the Baftas. It was the telly equivalent of an Only God Can Judge Me tattoo.
Behold Wootton, a sideboard made of ham, with efit eyes, dropping quotable quotes so fast there was no way you could possibly digest the last one before the next one was being gnashed out through his veneers. I want to say it was like watching a washing machine play King Lear, but I think it’s somehow even more ludicrous to say it was like watching Dan Wootton play sincere.
Still, let’s go: “Smear campaign by nefarious players … like all fallible humans, I have made errors of judgment in the past … being in the middle of this witch-hunt has made me think a lot about the sort of journalist and broadcaster I aspire to be … I mean, who doesn’t have regrets? Should I be cancelled for them many years later? Or do you accept that I have learned and changed?”
No. I don’t. I’ve seen your show and I can read your columns.
“Over the past few years I have grown professionally and personally,” continued this … victim statement, is it? “And I have found the meaning of true love.” Oh man. Amazing that the serial tormentor of so many women in the public eye should attempt to make this a hymn to personal growth. I don’t think – how to put this carefully? – I don’t think that line is going to hold, sir.
All in all, the spectacle of Dan Wootton begging for nuance and empathy is the heat death of irony. The two crucial things about people like Dan is that they are, without exception, monstrous hypocrites – and they also reduce the world. Their entire business is making human experience smaller. There are about six or seven basic story templates into which they believe all other people’s lives must be squeezed, whether or not they want them to be. So to find the high priest of the reductive suddenly asking for an acknowledgment of complexity feels a little much.
Others, it should be said, are asking for different things. The Sun is asking its staff to contact its lawyers if they have any information about the “very serious” claims, and not to talk to journalists(!). MailOnline is also looking into the claims.
Are they part of the “dark forces” Wootton railed at, when he cast the whole business as an attempt to cancel GB News for being “the biggest threat to the establishment in decades”? To make it super simple for Dan: GB News is not “anti-establishment”. It is a London telly channel owned by a hedge funder and an investment firm. The deputy chairman of the governing Conservative party is one of its presenters, as is a recently knighted former cabinet minister whose father was a long-serving editor of the Times.
Amusingly, though, the Wootton story was seized on by someone soon to present his own show on GB News: John Cleese. “The mainstream press must check this out,” stated Cleese, declaring that failure to do so would be “final proof of their complete corruption”. Will John’s own fearless new employers check it out? Or is Cleese himself one of the “nefarious players” trying to cancel Dan?
A lot of threads yet to unravel, it must be said. The tabloids’ disinclination to report on the story thus far means coverage is not coming as thick and fast as it did when, say, Dan was obsessively pursuing ITV over Phillip Schofield’s affair with a much younger colleague. Or indeed when his GB News co-hosts were ranting round the clock about the BBC and Huw Edwards, only for Wootton to react to news of Edwards’s hospitalisation with a poll asking “is this a crisis of the BBC’s making?”.
As we wait for developments, then, perhaps convention demands we ask: is this current situation a crisis of Dan Wootton’s making? I think the answer would have to be … friends fear so.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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