Lucky GB News staff have had a special guest in the office this week – late-night presenter and Trump cheerleader Bev Turner, who normally broadcasts from Washington, has been back in the Paddington studios.
Alas, the return hasn’t been happy for everyone. Bev’s habit of mentioning what great friends she is with the president and how she has his personal phone number has caused some eye-rolling among staffers (although he’s seemingly yet to answer one of her calls, while being happy to pick up for half of the DC press pool in recent weeks).
Others are open-mouthed at rumours that the former basketball presenter is making a whopping £420,000 a year for doing the channel’s graveyard shift. That has gone down as well as one might imagine with producers on a starting salary of £30,000 or camera operators on £24,000.
Turner’s cameo appearance coincides with Reform’s unofficial news channel dealing with non-appearances from politicians on both flanks. Christopher Hope, the channel’s political editor, has spent much of the week working himself up into a fury over why it should be that the Labour ministers GB News spends so much time denigrating are choosing not to speak to his station.
On Thursday morning, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper declined to appear on the channel’s breakfast show, while at a press briefing at Downing Street later that same day, defence secretary John Healey failed to take a question from GB News’s correspondent.
“GB News viewers are worrying about the threat of Russia as well as a conflict in the Middle East and its effect on day-to-day life here, and so it is hugely disappointing to our viewers that our foreign secretary Yvette Cooper refused to come on the channel this morning for our breakfast show, and hours later John Healey refused to take a question from a GB News reporter in the room at a briefing at Nine Downing Street,” moaned Hope on air.
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“This really is, quite frankly, an insult to our viewers and listeners, and I want to remind them, through this broadcast, that all government ministers are always welcome on our channel and will always get a fair hearing.” Of course they will, Chris!
Meanwhile, on the channel’s right flank, it is battling Rupert Lowe, the former Reform man who now leads the extreme right Restore Britain after falling out with Nigel Farage – and is now convinced he is banned from the channel on his former boss’s orders.
Lowe used to be a regular face on the station’s shows but is now apparently no longer invited, and he is convinced, as is his army of online followers, that it is on Farage’s orders.
Following complaints, Hope posted the station’s editorial charter on X, only for Lowe to respond: “You write – ‘we offer a platform where all voices are heard’. Really? When will I be allowed back on live GB News, Chris? Or is Farage’s ban still ongoing?
“These are pathetic words whilst your channel continues to censor and ban Restore Britain.”
Perhaps Lowe should focus his attention more on actually building a proper political party which competes in elections. For all his bluster about Restore Britain having 127,000 members and winning the next general election, it is not fielding a single candidate in next month’s elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and only a handful for the council polls in England – all of whom are standing in his own Great Yarmouth constituency.
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