“The four-day week is a culture based on folly and built on fantasy. If Labour backs it, it will be the ruin of us,” ran the headline on Andrew Neil’s Daily Mail column at the weekend.
This will be news to Neil’s erstwhile colleagues at Times Radio. When he presented a midday show there last year, he only worked Mondays to Thursdays, with a revolving list of supply presenters filling in on Fridays while Brillo relaxed on the terrace of his home in Grasse in the south of France. Neil is now on a “break” from the station – one from which, mindful of the “break” he took from his former gig at GB News, some of his colleagues wonder if he will ever return.
Meanwhile, right wing rentagob Rod Liddle – host of an eminently missable new Saturday morning show – is not the only exciting new voice to be given airtime by Times Radio. Elisabeth Dampier, billed as a “German-based writer”, popped up on the station recently to explain why she will vote for the neofascist Alternative für Deutschland in the forthcoming parliamentary elections (they are “the sensible option when the other parties are so extreme,” apparently)
Dampier is a woman in demand. She also got to pen a lengthy article in last week’s Spectator outlining why, “as an educated millennial”, she was backing the AfD.
Quite why Dampier’s views are so highly sought is unclear. Despite being billed as a writer, Rats in a Sack’s Teutonic cousin, Ratten im Sack, has never heard of her. A Google search only directs to links to her Spectator article, or posts about her Spectator article. And she has only 55 followers on X, a platform she only joined last month.
Still, it can’t hurt that her husband, Guy, is a senior figure at the Legatum Institute, which has been called “arguably the most influential think tank in Britain pushing its free market pro-Brexit vision and enjoying privileged access to media and ministers”.
Over in the world of TV, meanwhile, whispers that GB News – whose modest ratings success is tempered by Ofcom complaints and scant interest from mainstream advertisers – may be softening its agenda of far right talking points and conspiracy theories appear to be premature.
The channel’s coverage of Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington DC next week will include Beverley Turner, co-host with journalist Andrew “Tory Boy” Pierce of its mid-morning show. Turner has been preparing for her trip by retweeting a series of bizarre claims – including that a leading European politician’s wife was born a man, that elite members of the World Economic Forum are secretly plotting to control the food chain and “remove ownership of privately owned farms” by 2030 and that “Epstein was a Mossad operation”.
She’ll fit right in in Trumpland. But will Turner fit in at a cuddlier GB News, if such a thing is ever delivered?
