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.)
