GB News risks turning Tories from political force to niche act

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. How will GB News change British politics? That’s one of the most frequent questions I get via email.

A good way to think about it, I think, is that at present the UK has one dominant party of government, the Conservatives, which wins most elections and which, for the most part, has only lost office because of a coming together of exceptional circumstances. Its main opponent, the Labour party, is an occasional party of government.

So one way that GB News could change politics is by changing the internal passions and thoughts of the Tory party, the dominant party. But the other way it could do it is by turning the Conservative party from the dominant party to an occasional one. Some more thoughts on that below.

Cast away

Which broadcaster will be the most important at the next general election? The BBC. Which broadcaster will be the most important in the next Conservative leadership election? GB News.

Those two things privately bother a lot of Tory MPs, who worry that the most significant consequence of GB News will be to move their party further away from the country. As George Parker and Daniel Thomas explain in their excellent piece on the broadcaster:

Conservative MPs said they sometimes received “cranky” emails from party members. “You’ll ask where did they hear this and they’ll say: ‘GB News’,” said one MP. The party is having an internal conversation formed outside the traditional media landscape. A survey by the ConservativeHome activists’ blog in January found that 57 per cent of Tory members said they regularly watched GB News, compared with 60 per cent who watched the BBC, the behemoth that traditionally dominates the news landscape.

How seriously should you take the ConservativeHome survey? Very! It is a consistently reliable gauge of where Tory activists are. I used to be quite sniffy about it, because the underlying methodology really ought not to work: it’s a self-selecting sample of Conservative members (just email your name and a copy of your membership certificate and hey presto! You’re more influential than any lobbying company in the UK).

But both my own reporting and, more importantly, internal contests in the Conservative party have consistently validated the ConservativeHome survey. It shouldn’t be treated as a perfect sample: as Paul Goodman, the site’s editor, has noted, it is pretty consistently a touch to the right of the party membership as a whole. The ConservativeHome user base gives you a pretty accurate read on the thoughts of the average Tory activist, who actually takes time out of their day to attend party meetings and go knocking on doors. It is less accurate, but still a good guide to the positions of the average Tory member, who might fill out a direct debit and forget about their membership other than when it comes to the moment they get to vote in the leadership contest.

So if ConservativeHome respondents are telling us that 57 per cent of them watch GB News, we should take that as a pretty good guide to what is influencing Conservative party members.

Are Conservative MPs right to be worried? Up to a point. From George and Daniel’s piece:

The highly ambitious target is to be the biggest news broadcaster — bigger than the BBC News and Sky News — by 2028. 

The important thing to note here is that while the BBC as a whole is hugely influential on electoral outcomes, is seen by millions of people, is the number one source of news for most people in the UK, etc . . . GB News isn’t.

The most influential things the BBC does in terms of the national mood — its app, the newsbreaks between the music on its music stations — are all things that GB News is not planning to emulate nor could it without a big shift in resources. Most British people do not follow news that closely nor do they have a particular desire to start watching a round-the-clock current affairs channel.

The US is a different story, of course, but it’s also worth remembering that Fox News launched in 1996. An awful lot has changed about how people consume news and media since then and the argument that you can replicate that success in the UK or anywhere in 2024 is, to put it mildly, not proven.

Nor is GB News’s 2028 aim comparable to what Fox News has done. GB News recently managed to get more viewers than BBC News and Sky News combined, which the broadcaster proudly wrote up on its website: it achieved that with a peak audience of 184,000. That is a little more than the total number of eligible voters in the July to September 2022 Conservative leadership election.

To put GB News’s aim into perspective: it would mean in terms of its total audience, the channel would do about as well as my favourite music station, Radio 3. Radio 3 is a vital part of the classical music ecosystem in the UK, it influences the taste of a large minority of people, but no artist whose audience is confined to that channel is going to challenge Ed Sheeran for commercial success anytime soon.

Tory MPs are right to worry that the big consequence of a channel whose viewership is thus far, concentrated among the Conservative party’s most favourable demographic groups — 80 per cent of its heavy viewership is over 55 — may be to turn their party from the most successful political force in the UK into a niche act.

That’s not to say that the Conservative party can’t win again if it moves to the right in opposition.

There are useful parallels here across the Channel and the Atlantic. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s presidential re-election was certainly helped by the fact that his main opponent was Marine Le Pen. (Plus, here’s a striking fact: you have to go all the way back to François Mitterrand in 1988 for a French president who was successfully re-elected for a second term against an opponent without the surname “Le Pen”.) Macron’s reshaping of French politics made his re-election hopes easier than had his main challenger come from the centre-right or the centre-left. Ditto, the Republican party’s hopes of a red wave were hurt in 2022 thanks to its association with Donald Trump.

But Trump did win in 2016 and might win in November, just as Le Pen might well win the next French presidential election. Many Tory MPs worry that GB News will turn their party into one of permanent opposition, in that it risks pushing the Tory party from being the one that wins most UK elections, to one that wins occasional elections.

Now try this

I had a lovely weekend: the high points were seeing The Motive and the Cue at the Noël Coward, which you can watch at cinemas throughout the UK — find your local screening here. It’s a terrific account of the fraught relationship between Sir John Gielgud and Richard Burton during rehearsals for the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, in which Gielgud was the director and Burton played Hamlet.

I also really enjoyed Robot Dreams, a lovely meditation on loneliness, relationships, loss and healing, which is also well worth seeing in cinemas.

Top stories today

• Chilling effect | Politicians, academics, artists and journalists are self-censoring on a large scale because of “severe levels of harassment and abuse”, according to the government’s independent adviser on social cohesion.

• ‘We pay a princely amount for that privilege’ | Britain’s housing offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy, combining high prices with old, cramped, poorly insulated buildings and long commutes, according to an influential think-tank.

• MPs to be given warnings of China cyber threat | Britain’s democracy is under threat from Chinese cyber attacks, MPs will be told today, after the hacking of voter details and the targeting of a number of China hawks in parliament.

• Eye to the future | Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has said he wants the NHS to lean on the private health sector in the short term so it can drastically reduce its dependence in the future, as he rejected New Labour’s “ideological conviction” that competition drives up standards.

• Key pillar of leasehold reform collapses | Michael Gove is fighting to salvage his flagship reforms of England’s leasehold system after a major proposal was quietly axed by the Treasury and Downing Street, the Sunday Times reports.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.