I was cock-a-hoop on Monday when GB News (GBN) rang up to ask if I would come on to talk about space. “Outer space or hanging space? Whatever. I can do both.”
They called late to test my internet connection and it wasn’t good. Over 30 minutes they asked me to sit on my router, use my iPhone, download an app (bye-bye bank details), until, 60 seconds before broadcast, I heard someone in the control room say: “You are kidding me.” Their server had been down the whole time.
No worry, for I was in the capable hands of host Colin Brazier, filling in for Andrew Neil, who took a break from his job less than two weeks after the channel launched and never came back. The internal politics are fascinating. Neil and his friends set up GBN because they were fed up with Sky and the BBC, both for their politics and decline in quality; they wanted to create a channel that was centre-Right, yes, but nuanced and sophisticated.
They share the project with red-meat culture warriors, who essentially want GBN to be TalkRadio on television – and it feels as if the latter are taking the lead after a launch that had a distinctly Acorn Antiques quality.
With viewing figures yo-yoing, the 7pm slot has been filled by Nigel Farage who, annoyingly for his Left-wing critics, turns out to be a superb presenter – a gift discovered and honed on LBC.
He also has a Trumpite ability to figure out early what is grinding people’s gears – hence he was reporting on the migrant crisis in the Channel months before the broadcasters would touch it.
When last week he accused the Royal National Lifeboat Association of having become a taxi service for people-smugglers, Neil tweeted that the lifeboats are the “epitome of courage and self-sacrifice”, an implicit rebuke reminiscent of the anxiety moderate Brexiters felt about Farage’s immigration “breaking point” poster during the EU referendum – a reminder of how divided Eurosceptics were in philosophy and strategy. Those disagreements have never been resolved.
Thing is, Farage has done for GBN exactly what its founders wanted: he has embarrassed the rivals by setting the news agenda and beating their ratings. Tuesday’s show got 107,000 viewers, vs 35,000 for Sky and 93,000 for the BBC News channel – the latter very significant because he was up against the excellent Outside Source, which was meant to be the new model of BBC programme-making. GBN is never going to get BBC One style ratings or provide the corporation’s breadth of coverage – silly metrics for a gonzo start-up – but translate that 100,000 into a regular audience, keep the advertisers happy, and you’ve got a long-running business model.
On the other hand, a culture war strategy can take you down strange roads. On Friday night, Mark Dolan interviewed Jennifer Arcuri, the American businesswoman allegedly linked to the PM. Dolan probably expected saucy banter; Arcuri turned out to be madder than a box of frogs, spinning a conspiracy theory about lockdown being used to restart the global economy. Neil would’ve torn her apart. Dolan mostly just listened, perhaps out of inexperience but, one suspects, he was also thinking, “If I call her a crazy person, I’m going to lose half the audience that agree with her.”
Indeed. Things turned nasty the day before when GBN’s Tom Harwood accused Laurence Fox of spreading false information about vaccines, and Lozza accused him in return of being the gatekeeper of acceptable opinion. After all, what is the point of GBN if not to air unfashionable opinion? Fine, except that when presenter Guto Harri took the knee on air, signalling his opposition to racism in football, he was suspended from his job (then quit). That’s the reality behind free speech. It’s never about a general principle of liberty, but taste: “I’ll give a platform to those I agree with, but I ain’t bankrolling, or watching, a news channel that expresses opinions I hate.”
GBN is technically far more proficient than when it began and, wisely, it’s introducing news bulletins, which will provide structure. I would advise them to scrap the daytime presenter partnerships that have all the chemistry of an awkward encounter in a lift; swap some afternoon programmes with a nice film (anything with John Mills will do); and try doing culture as well as culture war. Why not a piano recital or history lecture? The Left politicises everything, which is why the BBC has become so unwatchable, and it would be truly conservative if GBN presented culture for its own sake.
Meanwhile, every element of the centre-Right must come to the aid of the operation because it needs breadth and teamwork. Conservatism is no longer the preserve of the Tory party and, as it has grown, adding new voters and viewers, it has institutionally weakened, becoming much harder to define or control. If there is a coherent base out there, what does it think about Covid? Should GBN seek to inform, be even-handed, promote an agenda, or simply stir things up a bit?
Whereas Conservatism historically transmitted ideas downwards – encouraging the masses to ape their “betters” – now it finds itself trying to second-guess what the voters want and offer it on a plate. To become, to use a now outdated telly analogy, less BBC, more ITV.
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