 We've offered a fair amount of speculation on this show as to why Andrew Neil, the BBC's former star interviewer, left GB News. Now, thanks to an interview in the Daily Mail, we can hear his perspective straight from the horse's mouth. GB News is just a disaster. I came close to a breakdown. It would have killed me to carry on. I had to quit. Andrew Neil breaks down in tears in his first interview since his exit from channel he helped create. It's an article with some real jaw droppers. We'll take you through some of the juiciest bits to begin. As was clear, anyone who watched the first two weeks of GB News will know that the channel was beset by technical mishaps. Neil describes the impact that had on him. He says, that stress was just huge. It meant you couldn't think about the journalism. You were just constantly wondering, will we make it through the hour? By the end of that first week, I knew I had to get out. It was really beginning to affect my health. I wasn't sleeping. Poor Andrew, losing sleep because the Kyrons were wrong under different guests' images on GB News. You really do feel sorry for the man. Ever vain, Neil was also upset about the set. He said, it actually looked like I was Kim Jong Un in a bunker about to launch a nuclear attack on San Francisco when it came to the launch. The digital war wasn't ready and they discovered they couldn't light or get the sound and audio right for the kitchen table. So we were then reduced to the habitat sofa found on a skip and the North Korean nuclear bunker. Neil, used to the high standards of the BBC, was not pleased, was not satisfied with the DIY aesthetic of the upstart channel. But he also emphasised that his ultimate reason for leaving was not a lack of technical standards, but rather journalistic ones. He described some pretty wacky ideas from GB News' bosses. One of the great ideas before I left was we do trial by television on the guilty men of Brexit. Those who tried to stop it, like Lord Adonis and Nick Clegg, I said, why do you want to do that? You won the referendum. We're out. But let me remind you that was the most miserable period of modern British politics. We should be looking forward to the 2020s. Another suggestion was that we should put secret cameras in classrooms to show how left wing the teachers were. I said, that's a really good idea, but I think you should take charge of that yourself. And I promise you that after you get in hot water for breaking about five different laws, including filming minors, come back and talk to me. It goes without saying that Andrew Neil hasn't taken any of this well. He complained to the mail. Why pay me all that money? Why make me chairman? Why make me lead presenter and then just not listen? So I'm angry that what should have been my last big media gig, which, if we'd made it work, could have been great turned out to be the worst eight months of my career, the worst by far from early January to last weekend when I finally got free of everything. Don't forget I've been on the IRA hit list twice. I've had special protection anti terrorist forces outside my house. I've been on the jihadists hit list. This feels worse. Dalia, who does your sympathy lie with in this very sorry tale? I mean, I do really wonder where all that money when I was speaking to someone who was who was in Labour conference. I didn't go into into conference proper, but they said that GB news was like the biggest production of all of the different media. They had like the biggest store when it looked like they had their kind of own studio in conference. I'm just like, there's just so much money. And I'm just like, where has this money gone? It's like a money hole. But I think I mean, on the topic of who do I feel sympathy with? I mean, let's be clear. Andrew Neil is not, you know, breaking down because he spearheaded a project that tried to boost the careers of every sort of what less right wing presenter out there from sort of Dan Wharton to to Nigel Farage. He's not breaking down because a presenter was, you know, literally canceled from his anti cancel culture TV show, or network for taking the knee in solidarity with England football players who had been facing racist abuse in the wake of the Euro's match. All he he's he's having a breakdown because he, you know, accidentally became the face and ruined his legacy by becoming the face of what looks like a low budget embarrassing production. Like all he talked about was himself, and how hard it was for him, how he doesn't get any sleep. And he doesn't think at all about, you know, all of those communities that are in the crosshairs of the culture wars, who experience on a micro and a macro level, the effect of the talking points that GB news was essentially set up to embed in even further into our culture. Because let me tell you, those people have had a lot of sleepless nights, they've experienced a lot of stress, a lot of negative impacts from having to live in that kind of culture. And they don't get to fall back on, you know, a nice Daily Mail column where they get to kind of garner sympathy, or fall back on a nice career. And I want to, you know, I actually want to read out sort of a section from Andrew Neil's opening monologue to give you an understanding that this he knew what he was doing. It's not the politics of this. And I think now he's you know, in question time, he was kind of trying to roll back on this to say, you know, oh, I, you know, why do you think I left this because it was so divisive. Andrew Neil knew exactly what he was getting involved in. The issue was that it just looked kind of crappy. Like he said, his opening monologue said, we will puncture the pomposity of our elite and politics, business, media and academia, and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture to the threat of free speech and democracy that it is. We will be more concerned with what will raise prosperity and create jobs in our left behind towns than what some overprivileged and a historic students decide to hang on their walls and Oxford. Social mobility and a fair chance in life for all will matter more to us than the wasteland to nowhere that is identity politics. Now, the dog whistle is a folk horn, essentially, that was all about saying, you know, we will speak to you, you know, voters who are fed up of, you know, black and brown and queer people having their concerns represented in politics, they don't matter. Their concerns don't matter. We we will, you know, talk about cancel culture, and then cancel the very people who express views that are not aligned with our world vision. And so Andrew Neil, what you can see in that opening monologue is that it was always his intention to throw a match onto a country that is drenched in petrol right now that is drenched in, you know, exploitation and division that is being metabolized in the form of, you know, the rise of a far right, essentially. And yep, it ended up looking low budget. And that's what he feels very embarrassed about. But that intention that he had to cultivate this culture to to drag the British media landscape even further to the right, and to essentially create a British Fox News. That intention is still there. And that's an intention that I have zero sympathy for. Andrew Neil was going for the culture war, you know, angle, it wasn't something that came from from without him. The woke watch section that was on Andrew Neil show, right? So he said, Oh, we're not going to talk about the obsessions of of student politics, etc. We're going to talk about how to level up the country and bring prosperity to the rest of the country. Right. I didn't see any segments on GB news about investment in regional areas. You know, I didn't see any, any segments on on new businesses opening and creating jobs. All there was was Andrew Neil going on and on about some new controversy or someone who wanted rights or someone who wanted to deny someone else their rights. You know, there was nothing about any of the things that they said or he said was lacking from the mainstream media. So all he did was go and talk about cancel culture and complain that all we talk about is cancel culture. It's it was just the most hypocritical thing I've ever seen. I want to show you the response from GB news to this interview from Andrew Neil. They said the following. At no point did Andrew raise concerns of the editorial direction of GB news moving to the right. As a member of the board, Andrew had the same rights and abilities to raise concerns and he was privy to all decisions. Now that statement to me, I don't trust the GB news spokesperson. But I would guess that if they're saying at no point did Andrew raise concerns, that means that there are no emails which exist of Andrew Neil raising concerns, because otherwise he would be able to embarrass them quite quickly. You might say, oh, maybe they spoke about it in a meeting. Andrew Neil was doing most of this from the south of France. So these communications would have happened via email. And I imagine if Andrew Neil had been really annoyed about the direction of the channel, politically, there would have been some evidence. The final comments on this particular story before we end tonight. What do you expect to happen when you have the roster of presenters that he was that he was presenting? And the thing is here as well is you talked about how we didn't see any segments on what to do with the increasing precarity of employment throughout the country. We didn't hear anything about housing crisis, about any of these issues that he's allegedly trying to speak to and what the rest of the media won't talk about. And it's because the whole point of this formula is to speak back to and reflect people's material concerns and reflect the disaffection that people feel and then just talk for hours and hours and hours about how working class black and brown people are the reason that you are experiencing the disaffection that you're experiencing. And this is why it's such a toxic mix. And it's why Fox News has been such a driving political force of the far right in the in the US is because it sort of speaks a little bit to the kind of very real issues that people are facing and the real alienation and disaffection that people are facing. And then just sort of fills all of the gaps with, you know, it's because people don't want the story of empire to be whitewashed. So that's actually very much engineered in in the design of this particular model of, you know, Fox News style culture warmongering. So it doesn't surprise me at all that we didn't hear anything that could actually be about sort of levelling up whatever that whatever that means.