British broadcast news has gone badly wrong

I’ve worked for some media thoroughbreds — including the Financial Times, ITN and CNN — so I know the sense of assurance that comes from wearing the badge of a long-established journalistic brand. But nothing — nothing — beats the buzz I now feel as a presenter on GB News. It’s the thrill of being part of a start-up, especially one so many want to fail. We GB News types are disruptive and entrepreneurial. We think that British broadcast news has gone badly wrong. It has become smug, stale and monocultural. We want to do something about that. Amid the advertising boycotts, inevitable technical glitches and even more inevitable catty reviews, we know we are on to something — and that’s what scares the incumbents. One particularly snidey review of our launch show, which managed entirely to misquote me, concluded that we’d last ‘a year, tops’. Well, we’ll see about that.

I co-host a daily daytime show with Gloria De Piero, who stood down as Labour MP for Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, at the last election after a stint in the shadow cabinet. Before politics, she was on ITV breakfast television; her last job was hosting a show on Times Radio, before quitting to join GB News. We’ve known each other for a long time — and have often been on opposite sides of big issues. While I backed Brexit, she voted Remain (although we were equally horrified at how much of our political and media class then tried to reverse the referendum result). While she’s from Bradford and I’m a Londoner, we share an ‘ordinary’ unflashy background, being the first in our families to go to university. And we’re both from immigrant stock. As De Piero & Halligan launched, Katie Derham tweeted cheery good wishes, joking that we sounded like a Chicago-based, crime-fighting cop duo.