TOP TORY LAUNCHES TV RIVAL TO ‘WOKE WET BBC’
Murdoch also plans news channel in wake of Rule Britannia debacle
A FORMER D owning Street adviser is behind a secret new project to set up an ‘impartial’ television news channel to rival the crisis-hit BBC, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Sir Robbie Gibb – who was a senior BBC executive before becoming Theresa May’s director of communications at No 10 – is spearheading a drive to raise funds for GB News.
The 24-hour station, due to launch early next year, aims to capitalise on growing discontent over the BBC, with sources describing it as an antidote to the ‘woke, wet’ Corporation.
The BBC has been rocked by a series of controversies over what’s seen as
BEFORE Sir Robbie Gibb switched careers to become Theresa May’s No 10 director of communications, he was that most elusive of creatures: a pro-Conservative, proBrexit BBC executive.
He bookended his two decades at the Corporation, where he rose to become the head of BBC Westminster, with stints in the thick of Eurosceptic Tory politics.
During the 1990s, Gibb, below, was a die- hard Brexiteer long before it became fashionable, networking with the Maastricht rebels as John Major’s Premiership limped to a close and socialising with freemarketeers at the Thatcherite Adam Smith Institute.
In 2001 he joined Michael Port illo’ s abortive leadership campaign, regarding him as the Tory Party’s ‘great Eurosceptic hope’. A fellow member of the campaign once recalled: ‘Robbie’s bald and middle-aged now, but then he had the glint in his eye. He really cared. It wasn’t just political games’. Gibb made his jump to Downing Street in the wake of Mrs May’s disastrous 2017 Election because he feared the loss of her Commons majority would jeopardise the Brexit project; he wanted to ‘get it across the line’. Gibb, now 56, whose brother Nick is the Schools Minister at the centre of the A-level debacle, was so dedicated to the cause that he spent his evenings touring Tory associations trying to persuade them to back the deal. Colleagues recall his ‘exasperation’ at what he regarded as the BBC’s institutionalised pro
Brussels metropolitan bias. The Wakefield- raised Leeds United supporter, who read economics and public administration at the University of London, has two grown-up daughters with wife Liz, a teacher. He now works as ‘a global strategic communications adviser’ and is leading a consortium to rescue the The Jewish Chronicle from liquidation.
He is socially liberal and his brother, who is gay, is said to have asked him to tell their elderly mother about his sexuality in case she said something ‘ she might regret’.
Mrs May knighted Gibb in 2019 for his efforts to keep Brexit – and her Premiership – on the road.
Sir Robbie has remained close to BBC presenter Andrew Neil, holidaying at his house in the south of France. Mr Neil, whose rottweiler interviewing style has fallen out of favour at the BBC, now tops Sir Robbie’s wishlist for the new channel.