Dan Wootton - GB News Silent

We are now way past the point where the question should first have been asked: how much worse do matters have to get with the deeply unpleasant Dan Wootton before Gammon Broadcasting™ News (“Bacon’s News Channel”) cuts the increasingly gaunt and ghostly looking presenter loose?

The episode count of article drops from Byline Times about The Great Man has now passed eight, and no matter what his pals in the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press do to keep his name out of the headlines, anyone who wanted to know, and by now many who don’t, has a broad grasp of the allegations against him. Wootton has been dropped by the Mail; he has had to change lawyers. Dan is truly desperate. His employers appear not to be.

GB News is also facing another tranche of Ofcom investigations. Or, as Jim Waterson at the Guardian has put it, “GB News is being investigated for four further potential breaches of impartiality rules, as the media regulator Ofcom struggles with the rightwing channel’s willingness to push the boundaries of British broadcasting rules”. Or not to bother with those rules at all.

The potential culprits included Tories Esther McVey, Philip Davies, and Jacob Rees Mogg, with a new addition to the cast being “a programme presented by the former Loaded editor Martin Daubney on 16 June, which included a discussion about small boats crossing the Channel and featured an interview with Richard Tice, the leader of Reform UK”. GB News is in the mire.

And increasingly so. Which once more begs the question as to why they don’t just cut Wootton loose. None of the Byline Times stories reflects well on a brand that is already home to poor editorial and production standards, broadcasting very little news, not offering a balance of opinions, employing presenters who flat-out lie and push conspiracy theories, and so on.

The latest exposé on Desperate Dan tells that he “used the pretext of ‘underwear modelling’ to target young reality TV personalities … Among those Wootton targeted over an eight-year period between 2011 and 2019 - during which he was working for The Sun, ITV and the Daily Mail - were The Only Way is Essex star Kirk Norcoss, Big Brother contestant JJ Bird, and an X Factor singer who was just out of his teens”. There was more.

“Wootton was on his first day as a columnist and feature writer for the Daily Mail in December 2011 when he approached Big Brother series 11 contestant JJ Bird, then 25, and who is today a boxing trainer having also been a pro-fighter”. Wootton claimed to be an amateur snapper “working with brands”.

Sadly, his target was unimpressed. “Mr Bird, who refused Wootton’s offers”. Maybe it was because the shoot would be at “mine in E1”, or that the line was drawn at “they also want to know if you will do a couple of … nude shots too because they do a lot of that”. He plied one target who visited the flat with more and more skimpy underwear. Yet GB News are standing by him.

Despite Paul Wragg from the University of Leeds responding “Here, we have serious safeguarding concerns that demand an explanation from ITV, the Daily Mail and The Sun, as to how one of its employees was able to use the status and charisma of his role to seduce others to bend to his will, to satisfy his own predilections, without consequence”. Indeed.

On top of all that, the Guardian is following its own leads, seemingly unwilling to join the circling the wagons exercise being undertaken by the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press. “Someone who called themselves Martin Branning has been accused of allegedly offering Wootton’s former Sun colleagues thousands of pounds in return for explicit material” they tell.

There was more. “Now a new witness has come forward to claim ‘Martin Branning’ and Dan Wootton were one and the same man … Andy Lee, a performer on the subscriber website OnlyFans, told the Guardian he met ‘Branning’ in person back in 2013 - and later realised he had actually met Wootton”. That the alias was used “to arrange a sexual encounter”.

GB News carries on as if nothing were amiss. They have chosen … poorly.

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