NIGEL FARAGE
Reform’s leader has earned over £400,000 from the channel since the July 2024 general election, for three nights’ work per week – suggesting he is on around £2,000 an hour. He is paid into his Thorn In The Side company, which means that he pays only 25% corporation tax, not 40% income tax. Farage also holds 500,000 shares in the company. A fierce critic of anti-tobacco legislation, in 2024 he missed a Commons debate on the smoking ban because he was on GB News instead.
MATT GOODWIN
Academic turned hard right pundit turned spectacularly unsuccessful Reform election candidate. Formerly a politics professor at Kent University researching the far right. Was Reform’s candidate at the recent Gorton and Denton by-election – something Nigel Farage hailed as him “coming home” to Manchester, despite Goodwin being born and raised in St Albans, Hertfordshire – but failed to take the seat in a campaign during which he boycotted a hustings and focused entirely on immigration in an area with a large Muslim population. Blamed his defeat on corruption and cheating, rather than him being very, very bad at politics.
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BEV TURNER
A former basketball presenter voted No 43 in FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in 2001, Turner is one of the channel’s most controversial hosts. A Covid sceptic, she is also dismissive of climate change, dubbing it “weather-fear porn”. Now presenting a late-night show from Washington DC, she defended “hero” Russell Brand when sex assault allegations were first made about him in 2023 and has parroted Vladimir Putin’s language that his invasion of Ukraine was a “special military operation” – something said to have influenced Boris Johnson’s decision to renege on his agreement to join the channel.
LEE ANDERSON
Reform MP whose response to any criticism is to invite the speaker to “get out of London and come and speak to some real people in Ashfield”. A former Labour MP turned Tory deputy chair, he is known as “30p Lee” after suggesting there was no need for food banks as “you can produce healthy meals” for just six bob. He earns £100,000 on top of his MP’s salary for presenting Lee Anderson’s Real World on Friday nights. His star is seen to have dimmed in Reform circles of late, and he was mocked for posting a photo from the Gorton and Denton campaign trail that actually showed him in Angela Rayner’s Ashton-under-Lyne constituency.
PATRICK CHRISTYS
Former local newspaper journalist turned Daily Express hack who faced complaints last year after a guest on his weekday evening show suggested a way to cut disability benefits would be to starve or shoot the disabled. Right wing pundit Lewis Schaffer said: “Just starve them,… you can’t just give people money. What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I’d suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.” Christys responded: “Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.”
BEN LEO
Co-host with Turner of US-based The Late Show Live, Leo is seen as a rising star at the channel despite telling a critic on social media: “You’re a low-energy wet wipe… whoever the fuck you are, you are on very shaky ground indeed.”
That is part of a ranting private message sent by GB News host Ben Leo to podcast host Don McGowan, who had suggested on X that Leo’s latest stunt for the channel – door-knocking on a street that contained houses of multiple occupancy in which migrants were resident – was ”xenophobic entitlement of the highest order”.
MARTIN DAUBNEY
Afternoon host and former Loaded editor who once organised a Straight Pride march as he was worried that heterosexual men’s rights were being “undermined.” A Brexit Party MEP for the UK’s final six months in the EU, Daubney became deputy leader of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party, winning 0.98% of the vote in the 2021 North Shropshire by-election. His on-air embarrassments include going to pieces and swearing during a “fast happening” live broadcast about an escaped terrorist suspect (“the terror man”), saluting Donald Trump’s motorcade and weeping as a hairdresser read out an anti-immigration poem (“Boats from the Channel flooding our shore/Illegal arrivals, yet they still want more”).
He then referred to the terrorist as “the terror man” and, growing increasingly more flustered, swore, stating: “F***, it’s all gone wrong.”
TOM HARWOOD
Former chair of pro-Brexit campaign group Students for Britain and a Conservative Party council election candidate, Harwood began his journalism career on the right wing Guido Fawkes website and wrote for the Telegraph before joining GB News, where he hosts the lunchtime show with Akua. Some in Reform circles would like him to stand for them at the next general election, but his broadcasting ambitions are likely to come first.
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MICHELLE DEWBERRY
“Dewbs” is a former Apprentice winner, Brexit Party candidate and passionate advocate of the death penalty who landed her GB News early-evening show after frequent appearances as a pundit on the likes of Question Time and Sky News.
The partner of wealthy former football chairman Simon Jordan, in February she lashed out at kids getting free toast at school. “If parents genuinely aren’t feeding their kids breakfast, they should be looked into,” she said.
JACOB REES-MOGG
Old Etonian former Conservative minister and hardline Brexiteer, who was ejected from his North Somerset constituency at the last general election, has had even more time on his hands after his little-watched reality show Meet The Rees-Moggs was cancelled and his GB News presenting hours were slashed in half. He still hosts State Of The Nation twice a week. After launching a podcast with historian David Starkey called Starkey & Mogg, he is now launching his own live stage show, Mogg Unbuttoned – “a series of live events that will take me from the green benches of Westminster to theatres across the UK”.
NANA AKUA
Teamed with Tom Harwood at GB News’s lunchtime show, the Newcastle-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants previously worked for auction channels Bid-Up TV and Price Drop. Awkwardly for some of her vaccine-sceptic colleagues, she worked with the Department of Health to encourage black, Asian and minority ethnic people to be vaccinated against Covid. More on-brand, she has opposed Black Lives Matters and taking the knee. Runs her own fitness brand, LadyXsize.
