GB News, the grubby tale of desperate Dan and a slide to the Right

DAN WOOTTON’S fall from grace — and from employment — stunned the presenter himself and the GB News team who worked with him. Wootton’s reputation at the station was one of impunity. His first show attracted 350 complaints after he delivered a fiery six-minute monologue on the “madness” of lockdowns. Ofcom declined to investigate.

- Stephen Armstrong

Even a lurid catfishing sex scandal this summer where an ex-partner accused him of adopting the pseudonym Martin Branning and offering colleagues thousands of pounds in exchange for explicit photos and videos didn’t dent his career. Wootton has admitted making “errors of judgment” but strongly denies any criminality.

“Wootton thought he was untouchable,” one former employee said over the weekend. “When the channel launched he was more nervy and uncertain, but the more he got away with, the more he insisted on controlling everything. He’d squash you if you didn’t toe his line.”

As Laurence Fox’s tweets last week showed, Wootton had been briefed on Fox’s plans to attack journalist Ava Evans over her comments on a men’s mental health minister. Wootton not only smirked, laughed and failed to counter Fox’s tirade of personal derogatory remarks but, according to GB News employees, ignored orders from producers delivered “increasingly frantically” over his earpiece to stop Fox, counter his claims and, eventually, to apologise to viewers after Fox had finished.

“We had management calling in during the show telling us to get Dan to do something, but he just ignored us,” a junior staffer said. “We added an apology on the autocue afterwards which he didn’t bother to read.” As the 7,300 complaints flooded into Ofcom — and GB News co-owner Sir Paul Marshall declared his interest in buying the Daily Telegraph — management decided enough was enough. Wootton’s frantic apologies and craven declarations that he thought Evans was brilliant proved insufficient in the face of GB News’s fear of Ofcom and Marshall’s bid for respectability. “The Dan Woot