ANDREW Neil has given a tell-all interview in which he rails against the unfairness of being paid £4 million to appear on GB News.
To be fair, that wouldn’t be enough for us either.
But behind the obvious goal of the interview - to absolve founding chairman Andrew Neil of blame for GB News's existence - there are some interesting points.
Here are five things we learned from reading his interview with the Daily Mail (so you don’t have to).
READ MORE: Andrew Neil humiliated in tense Question Time exchange over GB News 'dog whistles'
1: Someone at GB News suggested secretly filming children.
In one part of the interview, Neil outlines some of the “great ideas” GB News staff had before launch. To be fair, it seems he’s being sarcastic when he calls them that.
Let’s hope so at least, as one of them is illegal and immoral to the extreme.
“Another suggestion was that we should put secret cameras in classrooms to show how left-wing the teachers were”, he claimed.
Even if GB News did sneak into schools and rig secret cameras in classrooms, who would watch the feed to check the teacher wasn’t being too woke?
Neil says he pointed out how that idea would break “about five different laws – including filming minors”. Thank God someone did.
2: Andrew Neil likes to call himself a “thumper”.
To read the Daily Mail interview, the journalist makes it sound as if Neil struggled to get a word out through the tears.
At the very beginning of the piece, the former BBC man “starts to cry”. He then “confesses” things several times, once with “tears falling”.
He later speaks while hugging the Daily Mail writer, “pauses and his chin trembles”, and has to take “several deep breaths” in order to continue speaking.
But in one of these overwrought sentences, the journalist reveals an interesting fact about Andrew Neil.
She calls him a “‘thumper’ (his word) of a man”.
His word? Mmmm.
3: Andrew Neil acts like a petulant child.
GB News might not need to secretly hide cameras in classrooms to find out how children behave, they can take a look at their former lead presenter.
At one point in the Daily Mail piece, we’re told: “Such is Andrew’s enmity towards the channel’s CEO, he can’t bring himself to mention Frangopoulos by name.”
Neil hates Angelos Frangopoulos, the former head of Sky News Australia and current boss of GB News, so much that he can’t even say his name?
Is that really what we’d expect from a “thumper”?
4: Andrew Neil thinks working at GB News is worse than being on “the jihadists’ hit list”.
Andrew Neil really didn’t like working at GB News. He didn’t get his own way and was ignored by the board, which has left him furious.
“Why pay me all that money? Why make me chairman? Why make me lead presenter and then just not listen?” he raged.
Poor Andrew Neil.
He found not getting his own way so unbearable that he considers the eight months he spent with the channel the worst of his career “by far”.
He says it was worse than being “on the IRA hit list twice”.
He goes on: “I’ve had special protection – anti-terrorist forces outside my house. I’ve been on the jihadists’ hit list. This feels worse.”
5: GB News is going to be just like Fox News.
Despite Andrew Neil’s almost constant proclamations before its launch, saying that GB News was going to be different and not like Fox News in the US at all, the channel is very much going that way.
Is anyone (except Neil) surprised?
He told the Daily Mail it wouldn’t head that way if he was there, but he only lasted a couple of weeks.
Now, he says: “Look at the direction of travel. They bring in these shock jocks in the morning and evening – Mark Dolan and this Patrick Christys. You’ve already got Dan Wootton.”
So, even Neil’s conceding that the channel he thought could be a “beautiful dream” is just going to be a cheap Fox News rip-off.
We’re shocked.
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