The announcement of a General Election on 4 July makes it an appropriate time to look back at how the connection between politics and regulation may have been a factor in Ofcom’s attitude to GB News at the time of the channel’s launch in June 2021.

The relevant sequence of events began in 2018:

2018 Lord Burns was appointed as Chair of Ofcom for a 4 year term. The appointment was made while Theresa May was Prime Minister.

June 2019 It was announced that the CEO of Ofcom, Sharon White, would be stepping down to become the Chair of the John Lewis Partnership. Lord Burns soon began the search for a replacement for his CEO.

July 2019 Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and focused, among other things, on getting the ‘right people’ into important public appointments.

2020 Lord Burns resigned as Chair after only 2 years and Melanie Dawes was appointed CEO. This was an unusual combination of events, normally Ofcom chairs like to be around to settle in a new CEO. It led to speculation that Melanie Dawes was Terry Burns’s preferred candidate for CEO but that Boris Johnson had insisted that Burns departure was the price of her appointment. The Guardian reported; ‘Burns is believed to have tussled with the prime minister over the appointment of a new Ofcom chief executive. Eventually he agreed to leave in order to get his own choice of Melanie Dawes’. The deputy Chair Maggie Carver became the acting Chair while the Government set about installing Paul Dacre, former Editor of the Daily Mail, as the new Chair..

May 2021 Paul Dacre’s application for the post of Chair appeared to fall at the first fence when a panel considering it rejected him. However Boris Johnson’s Government refused to accept this as the final word and set about re-running the selection process in a different way to ensure Dacre’s appointment.

June 2021 GB News launched and after only one week Ofcom executive Kevin Bakhurst told a Media Society event that he saw nothing wrong with the content. This was another unusual event. Normally Ofcom executives would not give an instant judgement on a new channel especially when it was clear there were going to be complaints which Ofcom would have to consider.

Nov 2021 Paul Dacre pulled out of the contest to become Chair and questioned whether Melanie Dawes was up to the job. The Guardian reported: ‘Dacre said the prime minister had given him the go-ahead to sack the existing Ofcom chief executive, Melanie Dawes, and appoint a fresh figure’ .

The bottom line: at the very moment GB News was launching and Ofcom was considering whether it breached the due impartiality rules the regulator’s CEO was aware that the Government was determined to install Paul Dacre as her new boss.

If these circumstances led Ofcom to make a decision about GB News’s compliance or otherwise with the due impartiality regulations because of the likely views of the man they expected the Government to appoint as their new Chair that would be unprecedented and it would be wrong.