As GB News turns five, here are 19 of its worst moments so far

To mark this momentous occasion, we’ve compiled 19 moments from the channel’s first five years that neatly capture its essence: from amateur-hour blunders to flat-out Ofcom regulation breaches. By the end, you may find yourself wondering how the channel managed to last five minutes, let alone five years.

1) There’s no riot goin’ on in Belfast for Bev Turner (June 2026)

Even in its fifth birthday week, GB News continues to produce content that would cause dismissals at any serious broadcaster. While discussing the ongoing public disorder in Belfast, presenter Bev Turner insisted that “there weren’t riots” and  “there was not a house that has been burnt down”, despite her guest  Matthew Stadlen repeatedly and correctly pointing out that houses and cars had been torched by balaclava-wearing rioters. Her response? “That’s not what that is… you are exaggerating.”

2) Andrew Neil’s hello and goodbye (June & September 2021)

Founding chairman Neil launched the channel promising it would avoid “fake narratives” and that “nobody is allowed to hector”. Yet on the very same night, Dan Wootton’s hectoring rant about lockdown drew 373 Ofcom complaints. Neil’s vision of a positive channel that would bring viewers “good news… there is much to report that is great and uplifting about our country” has not aged well.

Neil stepped down after presenting only eight programmes, citing internal tensions. He later described himself as being “a minority of one” on the channel’s future, and revealed that production disasters (including sitting down one minute before a live show and finding out that there had been no guests booked) had almost triggered a personal breakdown. He later said working at GB News was “worse than being on the IRA hit list”.

3) Jeffrey Epstein “wasn’t a paedophile” (June 2021)

On a segment discussing the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his friendship with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, outraged pundit Lady Colin Campbell claimed that Epstein “wasn’t a paedophile”. Rather, she said, the pervert financier was an “ephebophile”. As a comedian once said, you cannot begin to explain the difference between the two without sounding like a pervert yourself, so I’ll let any intrigued readers Google the exact definitions at their own risk.

4) On-air vomiting and other disasters (June 2021)

An undoubted highlight of GB News’s early broadcasts came during an interview with a theatre worker about Covid restrictions, when (in an already very shaky handheld camera shot), a person in the background could be heard very clearly retching and vomiting.

The channel’s opening weeks had been billed as a major intervention in British broadcasting, but what viewers actually got was frozen graphics, malfunctioning microphones, and disappearing sound. Meanwhile in early call-in segments, presenters regularly fell victim to classic prank names such as Mike Hunt, Hugh Janus and Mike Oxlong, reading them out live on air.

5) Nigel Farage gives life to the lifeboats (July 2021)

It was just the sort of topic that Nigel Farage’s bosses – who pay him around £350,000 a year for a couple of nights’ work per week – must have thought would do wonders for ratings: the firebrand politician claiming on his GB News programme that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was “increasingly becoming a taxi service for illegal trafficking gangs” because of its role in rescuing migrants attempting to cross the English Channel. The charity, which has saved hundreds of thousands of lives since its founding, hit back, and ended up with real winners – resulting in over £200,000 in donations from supporters in a single day.  

6) Laurence Fox taken off the box (Sept 2023)

A regular guest on the evening show presented by former Sun showbiz hack turned right wing pundit Dan Wootton, Fox made crude and offensive comments about journalist Ava Evans, including asking “Who would want to shag that?” The incident prompted over 8,000 Ofcom complaints, with the regulator ruling it “unambiguously misogynistic.” Just as he had been by Billie Piper, Fox was unceremoniously sacked, while Wootton was suspended before parting company with the station the following March.

7) Demonised for taking the knee (July 2021)

Presenter Guto Harri, once Boris Johnson’s Downing Street director of communications, took the knee live in solidarity with England footballers, a gesture widely recognised as a rejection of racism and discrimination. Was this act of decency celebrated? No. Viewers boycotted the channel, which saw ratings hit zero and led to Harri being censored. He described the reaction as “a tsunami of disappointment, resentment and hate”, adding that “by Thursday night, the boss called and I’d been taken off air”. 

8) Naomi Wolf’s vaccine lunacy (October 2022)

Mark Steyn’s programme became the source of one of GB News’ most serious Ofcom rulings after writer turned anti-vaccine campaigner Naomi Wolf claimed the Covid vaccination programme amounted to “mass murder”, making comparisons with doctors in pre-Nazi Germany. Steyn also breached Ofcom regulations in 2023 by presenting misleading health data around Covid vaccinations, and revealed in a blog post that he used to refer to GB News’ in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch”.

9) Dan Wootton’s Insulate Britain ‘joke’ (September 2021)

Interviewing a driver who collided with three climate activists from the Insulate Britain group as they were protesting on the M25, Wootton asked how tempted she had been to go “a little bit harder into those women”. It was all a big joke to GB News, but the driver was later banned from driving for a year, given a community order, fined £240 and ordered to retake her driving test after pleading guilty to dangerous driving .

10) Neil Oliver’s turbotroubles (May 2023 & Jan 2024)

Once the avuncular host of BBC’s Coast, presenter Neil Oliver had become an apocalyptic ranter by the time he was hired by GB News, his monologues sounding like dispatches from a man trapped inside the comment section of a conspiracy theory Reddit page. After his anti-vax, anti-climate change diatribes led Scotland’s most prestigious body, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to ask for his resignation, Oliver took to social media to ask: “Anyone fancy a Revolution?” before later clarifying that he meant what he said. So that’s reassuring.

A few months later, Oliver told viewers that Covid vaccinations have caused what he called “turbo cancers”. Despite the idea being dismissed by scientists, Ofcom – then under the laissez-faire regime of GB News fan Michael Grade – cleared Oliver but as a precaution the station now broadcasts his live content on YouTube, away from the regulator’s rose-tinted glare.

11) Martin Daubney hails to the chief (September 2025)

During coverage of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK, hapless former lads mag editor Martin Daubney saluted the presidential motorcade as it passed by while a guest delivered what can only be described as a spoken love letter to a convoy of cars, calling it “a sight to behold”. Daubney then agreed it was “quite a moment” and indeed it was.  Funnily enough, as several viewers pointed out, Daubney appeared to salute with his left hand – traditionally considered disrespectful in military etiquette.

12) Lucy White is quite far right (Nov 2025)

The channel found itself being urged to cut ties with contributor Lucy White after she watched Commons deputy speaker Nusrat Ghani taking the chair during the Budget and wrote on XL that there “should not be a single person born in Pakistan in the UK House of Commons”. White also caused controversy with repeated posts about Heathrow airport workers speaking in foreign languages, including this from July 2025:

“Went into M&S. Three @marksandspencer staff speaking in another language,” she wrote. “I asked them ‘What language are you speaking?’. They responded ‘Hindi’. I have a voice recording & their names to report to M&S. We must confront them every time.”

13) Bev Turner, the new David Frost (July 2024)

When GB News landed a ‘world exclusive’ interview with Donald Trump, you might have expected at least some attempt to challenge one of the world’s most prolific bullsh*t merchants. Instead, Turner mostly sat back and let Trump crack on with spouting nonsense, for example claiming that climate change was a “hoax” and that London was a no-go zone for police.

Turner didn’t just fail to challenge these claims; at several points she joined in with them. When she wasn’t agreeing, she was lavishing praise on Trump – “I almost don’t know what you’re going to do for the next few years. You’ve done so much in such a short space of time”; “You’re obviously a really good dad”; “I always think when I watch you, I think you have certain different hats you put on. You’ve got your TV guy, you’ve got your property developer guy. Talking about the ballroom, which I think is brilliant…” She later said of the fawning interview, “I felt like a schoolgirl”, about which no further comment is necessary.

Having pitifully failed in its first investigation of this landmark moment in journalism, Ofcom is currently investigating it for the second time.

14) Mark Steyn’s fine people on both sides in Ukraine (March 2022)

While ranting about the war in Ukraine, Steyn presented this jaw-dropping take: “There are innocents in Ukraine, undoubtedly – the pregnant women in labour covered in blood emerging from a shelled hospital, the dead children lying in the street… but it’s harder to figure out who the good guys are.” I’m no geopolitical expert, but I get the feeling that it’s probably the country that was illegally invaded.

15) Nigel Farage, the Kabaddi baddie (August 2023)

Following violence at a Kabaddi tournament in Derby, star host Farage told viewers that the “finger of blame” pointed towards people connected to the Khalistan separatist movement. British Sikhs called the idea ludicrous, while the Sikh Federation UK described the comments as “inaccurate and biased, misrepresented the facts, were offensive, misleading, discriminatory, spreading hate and were unfair”. A press officer from the Sikh Press Association called it “maybe the worst example of anti-Sikh reporting I have seen from a UK news organisation in nearly nine years of covering Sikhs in the UK media”. Did Farage and the channel learn anything from this incident? Evidently not.

16) The Tory love-ins (March 2023 & February 2024)

Though it is now very clearly a Reform TV channel, GB News was ready to do its bit to support the last government, leading to a pair of unbalanced shows that even toothless regulator Ofcom had to rule as breaches. First, Conservative MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies interviewed Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt about his Conservative Budget, with precious little challenge from any non-Conservative perspective. Even by GB News standards, it was difficult to distinguish from a Tory Party conference fringe event. 

Then in the run-up to the 2024 general election, Rishi Sunak appeared on a one-hour special that Ofcom ruled gave him an “uncontested platform to promote the policies and performance of his government in a period preceding the UK General Election”. Don’t worry though, it’s not like they’ve since given undue airtime to any other major candidates likely to be frontrunners in the next general election…

17) Beanz meanz 30p Lee (June 2023)

The early days of Lee Anderson’s Friday night show were magical television, with the stone-faced then-Conservative MP muttering about migrants while looking like a nightclub bouncer with shellshock. To liven up one rant about reliance on food banks when sensible budgeting was the answer,  bosses asked lovable Lee to show how good budget brands were by spoon-feeding several cans of cold baked beans into the mouth of fellow MP Brendan Clarke-Smith. Bizarre, slightly vomit-inducing, and also incredibly out of touch – the Daily Mirror reported, after the incident, that Anderson earned the equivalent of a weekly family food shop for every minute his GB News show is on air.

18) Josh Howie’s slap on the wrist (January 2025)

Comedian Josh Howie made comments implying that the LGBT community included paedophiles, leading to 71,582 complaints and an eventual ruling by Ofcom that it had breached the Broadcasting Code. When Howie appeared on a different GB News show two weeks later to apologise, Ofcom considered the matter resolved. As with many examples on this list, GB News has been allowed to break the rules time and time again, receiving only a slap on the wrist whilst offensive and misleading messaging is pumped directly into the eyes and ears of its millions of viewers.

19) Martin Daubney meets the terror man (September 2023)

When news broke that terror suspect Daniel Khalife had escaped from Wandsworth Prison, GB News was calm and professional under pressure. A panicked-looking Daubney announced “this is breaking news – it’s fast happening!”, proceeded to refer to Khalife as the “terror man”, and then swore on live TV, mumbling “it’s all gone wrong”. Indeed it has, Martin – and no doubt it will continue to go wrong for GB News for many years into the future.