Here’s what you can expect from Boris Johnson’s new GB News show
The former PM has a history of taking the money and disappointing, writes Sean O’Grady. Why should this new venture be any different?
Has it come to this? Has troubled TV channel GB News sunk so low now that it has been forced to hire Boris Johnson? A man chased out of office by his own MPs? Who left parliament before he was suspended for lying to the House of Commons? Whose private life is so shameful that he’d dare not speak of it in public for fear of outraging decent people?
Yes, is the answer to that. GB News has betrayed its finest tradition by hiring him. “The people’s channel”, as it likes to think itself in its pomp, was once the proud host to such honest-to-goodness conspiracy theorists as Mark Steyn.
Not long ago it could boast the presence of journalists such as Dan Wooton. There was even a self-described cadre of “freedom fighters”, led by the redoubtable Captain Laurence “Lozza” Fox and his padre, Deacon Calvin Robinson. The channel was responsible for great TV moments, such as when Lee “30p” Anderson fed Whiskas to fellow star Michelle Dewberry – and who can forget Martin Daubney breaking the news of the capture of escaped terror suspect Daniel Khalife?
Yes, GB News was, and is, bad, and home to some of the very worst broadcasters. But hiring Johnson? We should declare a day of national mourning.
It’s not hard to see what Johnson gets out of it, however. He has an expensive, if not lavish, lifestyle and he and his (latest) family need every penny he can lay his hands on.
GB News will probably more than make up for his parliamentary salary, but, much more important, his remit to make “documentaries” about Global Britain (whatever that is) will give him ample opportunity to visit the kinds of exotic locations where Brexit Business Britain is maximising its opportunities – the Maldives, for example; the Seychelles; and, of course, those Caribbean holiday resorts so long neglected by our industries when they were under the jackboot of Brussels.
The Indian Ocean, after all, boasts huge economic potential, and is (genuinely) of great strategic importance. Where better to enjoy a couple of weeks exploring Global Britain’s geopolitical role? Johnson, like Alan Whicker, David Frost and John Simpson in their day, will have a wide remit, and we may be sure he will make the very most of it. GB News will be expected to pick up the tab on behalf of the freebie-loving Johnson, and to accommodate Johnson en-suite, with or without his current family.
Obviously there’s also an element of Johnson keeping up his personal political profile, much as Nigel Farage does on the channel – though how these two wannabe future leaders of the Conservative Party and prime minister will get along remains to be seen. Like two scorpions in a jam jar, one suspects.
My fear, on behalf of GB News, would be that they will discover something about Johnson that they really ought to know now – that he’s a chancer. Countless teachers, tutors, editors, party leaders, ministerial colleagues, advisers, publishers, wives, girlfriends and others will cheerfully attest to his extreme unreliability and pathological selfishness, and how even the most glancing of acquaintanceships with him can spell disaster.
He is still supposed to be delivering a biography of William Shakespeare, Riddle of Genius, commissioned at least eight years ago, and for which he was given an advance of £88,000. Now his memoirs (with an advance of half a million) will take precedence – though I can’t see him producing them if they will hurt his chances of making a comeback. The real riddle is why his publishers ever thought they’d actually get a manuscript out of him.
Johnson’s current contract at the Daily Mail, for the latest example, requires him to write one “must read” column a week, with the informal expectation that he’ll create a bit of a story now and again in return for rumoured six-figure fee. Sadly, Rishi Sunak and his colleagues aren’t quaking in their shoes every Friday afternoon waiting for Johnson’s explosive copy, and his contributions to public debate have raised barely an eyebrow.
His latest idea, for example, is that we shouldn’t equate Israel and Hamas, which is fair enough but hardly controversial, and most weeks he prefers to reminisce about his dog, Dilyn, and his encounters with royalty – rather than Sunak, Partygate revelations, or the mess the country is in (understandably enough, in view of his role in getting us where we are today).
So I wouldn’t actually expect to see that much of Johnson on GB News in the coming months because he will be doing as little documentary-making as possible. Even with the travel perks, he will be treating his latest gig in precisely his usual manner – taking the mickey out of the mugs who’ve hired him.
He is the most self-entitled man in Britain, as if we didn’t know it, and will regard his GB News “job” as a source of pin money, free holidays and freelance recreations. One can only hope that the Tory party, soon to undergo the convulsions of post-electoral disaster, haven’t forgotten what he did to them last time they gave the old mountebank a chance; the voters haven’t.
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