The values of the Arsehole Warehouse

GB News has apologised for Laurence Fox’s misogynist rant and suspended him. Dan Wootton says it’s not what the channel is about. 🤡

Previously: 'Substack pundit'
Establishment media, sneering, and the power of platform snobbery.

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Update: Since this edition was published, Dan Wootton has also been suspended from GB News. Sadly, the rest of the channel’s roster remains on-air.

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Laurence Fox was an actor once; now he’s a flesh puppet for donors — including the multi-millionaire train-obsessive fund manager and coward Jeremy Hosking — who fund him to behave like a haunted jukebox filled with Oi! records, half-remembered Bernard Manning jokes, and garbled transcripts of Oswald Mosley speeches. He is also paid by GB News — itself funded, in part, by hedge fund mogul and ‘cancelled’ banjo-twat breeder Paul Marshall — to perform the same act, both on his own show and as a frequent guest on grievance wanking spectacles like Dan Wootton Tonight.

Wootton — who faces a range of credible accusations, including of secretly producing sexual videos with unwitting ‘stars’, which he denies — had Fox on his show last night, in a segment called ‘The Fox Report’. Sadly, it isn’t 5 minutes of footage of delightful bin diggers sloping around our cities. Instead, it featured Fox claiming that the UK is “a Communist country” and launching a disgusting personal attack on the journalist Ava Evans aka. Ava-Santina. He was responding to the Politics Joe writer/presenter’s appearance on Politics Live earlier in the day when she debated the idea of a Minister for Men with the comedian Geoff Norcutt.

Wootton introduced the segment by calling Evans, “a hard-left commentator” and claiming she had “mocked and smirked” about the issue of men’s suicide. The clip — which Wootton played — does not show any mocking or smirking. Fox ranted:

We're past the watershed so I can say this… show me a single, self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman… ever… ever.

That little woman has been fed... spoon-fed oppression day after day after day, starting with the lie about the gender pay gap. She's sat there, and I'm going like, if I met you at a bar and that was like sentence three, chances of me just walking away are just huge. We need powerful, strong, amazing women who make great points for themselves. We don't need these feminist 4.0. They're pathetic and embarrassing.

Who'd want to shag that?

Wootton responded by chuckling, failing to read Evans’ tweets on the appearance (“I’m just going to provide a touch of balance..”) and saying glibly, “She’s a very beautiful woman, Laurence”. Fox went on:

Those sorts of women, men are repulsed by. How dare you do that to Geoff Norcutt? … Women like that need to be told to do one.

After Evans tweeted, with a clip of the exchange…

Laurence Fox just did a whole speech on GB News on why men apparently won’t shag me? I feel physically sick.

… GB News and Wootton issued statements of apology. The channel said:

Comments made tonight on GB News by Laurence Fox were totally unacceptable. What he said does not reflect our values and we apologise unreservedly for the comments and the offence they have caused. We have launched an investigation and will be apologising to the individual involved.

As I was writing this edition, it issued a further statement, announcing that Fox has been “formally suspended” and continuing:

Mr Fox’s suspension is effective immediately and he has been taken off air. We will be apologising formally to Ms Evans today.

Wootton wrote this morning — having sent a perfunctory series of ‘apologetic’ tweets to Evans last night — that:

I want to reiterate my regret over last night’s exchange with Laurence on GB News. Having looked at the footage, I can see how inappropriate my reaction to his totally unacceptable remarks appears to be and want to be clear that I was in no way amused by the comments.

I reacted as I did out of shock and surprise in an off-guard moment while working out how to respond as he continued to speak by searching for tweets [Evans] had sent earlier in the day while having them read out in my ear at the same time.

However, I should have intervened immediately to challenge offensive and misogynistic remarks. I apologise unreservedly for what was a very unfortunate lapse in judgment on my part under the intense pressure of a bizarre exchange.

I know I should have done better. I’m devastated that I let down the team and our supportive GBN family. We seek to tackle the issue and not the person, which I intend to stress again on air tonight.

If Wootton apologised every time there were “unacceptable remarks” on GB News, he would do nothing else. It’s similarly ludicrous to claim he intended to go for the ball and not the player when the entire segment was set up to attack Evans. Were he to launch a signature scent, like other demented F-list celebrities of his stature, Wootton should call it Disingenuous (Pour Homme).

Fox has, of course, doubled down and howled about how he’s got lots of experience at being “cancelled”. Such as being cancelled from being married; cancelled from regularly seeing his children; and cancelled as a musician by a public who simply refused to buy his albums, possibly due to a woke belief in not listening to what sounded like actual foxes shagging on someone’s lawn.

Wootton didn’t laugh because he was awkward, he laughed because he was enjoying the bullying and hoping to keep in with the marginally more popular boy. Had he tried to be professional — a vanishingly unlikely prospect — he would still have failed; his broadcasting style is best described as ‘over-confident dog becomes convinced that it can read human language and barks gleefully at the autocue’.

Were GB NEWS actually a channel with ‘values’ as it desperately claims to be, it would have suspended Wootton from his £600,000 role weeks ago when the extensive allegations against him were published by Byline Times (even MailOnline managed to take that step). Instead, it has protected and defended its presenter, allowing him to attack his accusers from the bully pulpit of a TV studio.

GB News throwing up its hands and contorting its corporate face into what it imagines is an expression of contrition recalls the infamous occasion when the Carphone Warehouse was required to distance itself from a racist incident onscreen during its sponsorship of Big Brother. In his show, 41st Best Standup Ever, Stewart Lee took apart how ridiculous the ‘corporate social responsibility’ rhetoric was:

This is a genuine press statement from the Carphone Warehouse: "Racism is entirely at odds with the values of the Carphone Warehouse". Entirely at odds. I don't know about you, Glasgow, but I was hugely relieved to read that press statement, because prior to reading that press statement, I had suspected that the Carphone Warehouse was, in fact, a front for a white supremacist organization…

… The values of the Carphone Warehouse. The sheer transparent naked hypocrisy of even imagining for a moment that such things exist as the values of the Carphone Warehouse. Do you follow the values of Jesus or Buddha or Marx? No, I follow the values of the Carphone Warehouse, committed as they have been these past twenty years to fighting racism through the unusual medium of discount phone retail, a sure method which for so long eluded the ANC and the Rock Against Racism movement.

I’m equally relieved to discover that Fox’s rampant hatred, bullying, and misogyny is entirely at odds with the values of GB News — home to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Neil Oliver, Dan Wootton, Beverley Turner, Andrew Pierce, Camilla Tominey, Darren Grimes… — aka the Arsehole Warehouse.

Ava Evans deserves to have the last word:

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