Mark Steyn gets some well-deserved enjoyment out of the collapse of GB News. In fairness he resurrects the "Steyn may be an anti-Muslim asshole but..." formulations used against him a decade ago...
Laurence Fox is very insightful and moving on the subject of male suicide. But, invited to opine instead on a very peripheral media figure 99 per cent of viewers have never heard of, he floundered - as I would do in such circumstances.
and...
But that's neither here nor there. It was a short segment guilty of nothing other than poor taste - which in the relentlessly vulgar Brit media is surely no big deal. Discussing the issue, Joan Bakewell - who in my salad days made her name on the Beeb as "the thinking man's crumpet" (ie, eminently shaggable) rather than merely the Bakewell tart (although Frank Muir liked to call her that, without consequence) - magisterially pronounced that Lozza is a "dick".
Shag dick dick shag wank bollock arse dick piss shag, all the way to the great Les Dawson's leering refrain of knickers knackers knockers: that's Brit public discourse, from the late Les to the thinking man's crumpet. This is a country in which a Minister of the Crown can suggest on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that Nigel Farage looks as if someone has put his finger up Nigel's bottom and "he really rather likes it"
However, he points out how one-sided the outrage always is:
But that's UK public discourse for you: it's unutterably vulgar - except that it's uttered round the clock. So the Minister of State at the Department of Defence is permitted to get her jollies slavering over the violation of Nigel Farage's posterior, but Nigel's primetime colleagues are not permitted to express a disinclination to violate.
Of course! Because Anna Soubry, Andrew Marr, Joan Bakewell, Adam Boulton and even young Ava Evans are all in the club - and Farage, Fox and Wootton aren't and never will be. That's what Mr Boulton's "delicate ecology" of UK broadcasting boils down to.
If that was it, it would merely be categorized under the "fall of our civilization" gag that Steyn has been on since Monica Lewinsky. However, it's moved into the sinister next phase:
And so, entirely predictably, the state censor Ofcom has now announced it's opening an investigation into GB News over its bizarre outbreak of non-shagging. I believe that's the twelfth current investigation into the channel, and we pretty much know the outcome. After all, GB's chief exec has already said the segment was "way past the limits of acceptance". So what are Lord Grade and Melanie Dawes going to "find"? Oh, no, relax, turns out it's perfectly acceptable after all?
Grade and Dame Melanie will rule against GB News and this time (unlike in my own cases) they will fine them. Rather a lot, I think. Because it has to be a big enough number so that Ava Evans (who has played this like the first violin of the Berlin Philharmonic) doesn't get her chums in the commentariat to run a zillion "Out-of-touch Ofcom thinks reducing women to their shaggability is only worth ten-thousand quid!" stories.
The end result, of course, is one side of the political spectrum doesn't get its stories told and its truth (coincidentally, the actual truth) laid bare.
Remember what the Steyn Show used to do on GB News? Vaccine victims ignored by the government and vaporised on social media. The industrial-scale gang-rape of English schoolgirls up and down the land from Rochdale to Banbury. The utter uselessness of the British constabulary, who are too busy dancing their clubfooted macarenas to investigate any crimes.
Seen any of that lately on GBN? As I've said with each of these new Ofcom complaints, GB News would have done better to push back against the Steyn rulings - because at least then you'd be taking a stand on the biggest public-policy disaster of our times, as opposed to defending the right to pronounce a woman entirely non-shaggable. Which, in terms of free-speech first principles, may indeed be a right, but not one you'd necessarily want to argue before a jury, never mind faceless ideological commissars of a highly politicised state bureaucracy.
The descent into a Tories'n'trivia channel was a conscious strategy to insulate GB News from its enemies. Doesn't seem to be working out.
Which of course culminated a couple days ago in the next phase: a television commentator being imprisoned apparently for the crime of being mean to a worthless slut.
In a fine illustration of that, HM Constabulary, who turn a blind eye to robbery, stabbings and the industrial-scale gang-rape of schoolgirls in every town up and down the spine of England, nevertheless have sufficient manpower to dispatch half-a-dozen officers to raid the home of our pal Laurence Fox.
