Even in the asleep-at-the-wheel world of retired Ofcom “regulator” Michael Grade, the deal with news channels like GB News is supposed to be clear: you have an obligation to reflect a variety of views.
To this end, the broadcaster—effectively the TV arm of Reform UK—will reluctantly invite a smattering of people who are to the left of Nigel Farage, even if they occasionally make them sit in a different part of the studio and label them “left in the corner”.
But woe betide any lefty who challenges the presenter too effectively. Expect a cesspit of spite and ignorance—not only on your own head, but on the honour and memory of your family. That’s the real deal.
Meet Bev Turner, star presenter on GB News, who presents a nightly show from Washington. You may remember her fawning interview with Donald Trump in which she allowed a raft of lies go unchallenged while simpering praise about the president’s gift for “dropping truth bombs”.
Ofcom initially found no fault with the overall programme, though it has belatedly decided to have a look more narrowly at the interview itself. Turner herself was unrepentant, explaining: ”It just so happens that the president [and I] believe in the same things.” We will see how that defence goes down with the regulator.
Meanwhile, Turner got into a row with token lefty Matthew Stadlen over her reluctance to call a riot a riot, a performance which has since attracted 400 complaints to Ofcom. She insisted that the disturbances in Belfast last week did not merit the label and accused Stadlen of exaggerating the situation in order to justify a possible government clampdown on social media.
This was quite the exercise in editorial gymnastics by Turner, who had herself described the protestors as “rioters” earlier in the same programme. GB News’s reporter on the ground, Dougie Beattie, also did not shy away from the “R” word. “It was quite hot and heavy for a while,” he told Turner. “It’s not the worst rioting I've ever seen, but it was there. And it really was quite vicious for a while or two. Many arrests.”
Well, there you go. A confused GB News presenter, an argument over terminology and a token offering of challenge. Michael Grade might think: what’s not to love?.
But even Grade might have recoiled at what happened next. Turner took to Elon Musk’s X, (her profile reads: “Freedom Fighter”) to denounce Stadlen as a “malleable asset to nudge the Establishment dial”. By way of conclusive proof she invited her quarter of a million followers to examine Stadlen’s family background.
Son of Nicholas, a High Court judge. Nephew of Godfrey, a Home Office civil servant. But look at his grandparents! Here I quote Turner verbatim:
His paternal Grandparents were Central European émigré intellectuals who brought Marxist, anti-fascist and Continental philosophical traditions to Britain. His grandmother's work and participation in intellectual circles, especially contributed to debates on Marxism and political theory.
Frankly, The Stadlen family sits in the upper institutional ecosystem of Britain through law and elite education…So when he is dead-set on making you think a certain way, take a breath, think harder and be extremely wary.
She would have saved space if she’d simply blurted out that Stadlen’s grandparents were Jewish.
Turner has since responded on X to charges of antisemitism to journalist Owen Jones, saying that she was “talking about Matt’s position in the British class system today” and telling Jones that “Drama queens like you see antisemitism in places where most of us just don’t”.
Turner’s CV boasts a first-class honours degree from Manchester University. There are GCSE students who would recognise the language in her X post as redolent of the antisemitic smears of fascists in the 1930s. But then, in Turner’s mind, being anti-fascist in the 1930s is apparently a good cause for distrust. What kind of crazy émigré intellectual could possibly have a beef with Hitler, Mussolini or Franco?
I declare an interest here. I have known three generations of Stadlens, including Matthew Stadlen and his grandparents, who fled the Nazis and found sanctuary in this country, for which they were eternally grateful.
Let me tell you how sinister they were.
Peter Stadlen was a concert pianist in Vienna, a pupil of the modernist composer Anton Webern. After briefly being interned in Britain as an “enemy alien”, he played in the famous wartime National Gallery concerts organised by Dame Myra Hess. He later became chief music critic of the Daily Telegraph and spent much of his free time researching Beethoven’s metronome markings. In later life, he revised his views of 12-tone serial compositions.
Quite the Bond villain.
His wife, Hedi, studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and—after fleeing the Nazis—at Cambridge, where she was a first-class honours student under Wittgenstein. She spent some time in Colombo as an anti-colonial activist before marrying Peter and assisting him in his musicology. When Peter died, she spent six years helping more vulnerable children in a north London primary school to strengthen their reading.
Towards the end of her life (she died in 2004) she expressed a sense of luck that she had ended up in England, adding that she hoped "the contribution made by Hitler's émigrés will be a good omen that current waves of émigrés from other tyrannies may be equally allowed to enrich the cultural life of Great Britain”.
Sickening, eh?
The remarkable cultural contribution made to this country by Jewish refugees is customarily lauded. Ask Michael Grade, whose own family, then Winogradsky, fled pogroms against Ukrainian Jews in the pre-Great War Russian empire.
But not Bev Turner, who invites us to view the Stadlen family with suspicion. When Matthew Stadlen tells you something “think harder and be extremely wary”. Look into “who he really is”. Consider his grandparents, who were Jewish anti-fascist refugees and cosmopolitan intellectuals,
Point made, enough said.
It is, of course, all of a piece with a channel that has something of an obsession with all kinds of immigration. Why distinguish between migrants fleeing Hitler and those seeking sanctuary today? You will recall that Grade, the dozy regulator, believes that critics of GB News are simply part of a “liberal, Islington consensus” bent on limiting freedom of expression. Give the “white majority” a fair hearing. His words.
Meanwhile, over at the BBC 550 further roles are going across its News, National and Content divisions. It is part of a series of savage cuts that have caused a 30 per cent decline in BBC public funding since 2010. Don’t bother to tune in for the quietly well-informed The World Tonight on Radio 4 in future. It’s being abolished. You’ll just have to stay up for Bev Turner at midnight.
It’s a funny old world in which a Labour government sits on its hands while the BBC news department is shredded. And has nothing at all to say about the toxic output from Reform TV. A curated world in which populist riots are not riots and in which the grandchildren of Jewish émigrés should be eyed with caution. And the one-time regulator sneers at those who find something new and ugly in what happened on his watch.
