What the hell has happened at LBC? I reveal the shocking truth about the station’s lurch to the hard-left
Former star presenters Nigel Farage, Maajid Nawaz and James Whale, as well as current insiders, speak out about the fall of the once great broadcaster
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LBC’s mid-morning presenter James O’Brien has been in a particularly foul mood the past three months.
Various insiders at the station tell me the infamously volatile host has spent most of his time during ad breaks desperately scrolling through his own X profile to check if his usually toxic posts are going viral – and desperately worrying when they’re not.
“He’s furious and spends his entire time sitting on his phone looking at polling about himself or looking to see if his posts on X are getting enough likes; he’s absolutely obsessed,” an LBC insider said.
O’Brien’s mood worsened from the moment he learned his much vaunted position as the station’s top presenter had been stolen in January by breakfast host Nick Ferrari, whose audience had surged (this week’s quarterly Rajar survey shows the duelling presenters neck and neck).
But the elevation of Ferrari back to the top of the ratings is a rare bright spot for LBC traditionalists desperately hoping the station might one day return to its roots as a centre-right force squarely aimed at the working classes and beloved by London’s black cab drivers.
Instead, the broadcaster’s stars now regularly mock, pillory and shout down the type of callers that were once the bedrock of LBC’s listenership but who their hosts now seem to regard as uneducated plebs.
LURCH TO THE LEFT
The Global-owned broadcaster has continued its further lurch to the left, even resulting in the station platforming Hamas-sympathising October 7 denialists.
Hard leftist Saturday night host Natasha Devon had to issue a grovelling apology to keep her job after doubting that Hamas terrorists sexually assaulted Israeli victims on that dark day.
Sangita Myska was unceremoniously dumped before the end of her contract after taking anti-Israeli positions, causing so much discomfort behind-the-scenes at the station that presenters like O’Brien, somewhat ironically given his own slump in listening hours, were encouraged to suggest she’d actually been booted because of bad ratings.
Earlier this month, sanctimonious Westminster establishment reporter Ben Kentish accused a Jewish caller called Martine of “racist fearmongering” for suggesting there was a risk Europe was under threat because of Islamism.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he raged.
Martine replied bravely: “I’m not ashamed of myself. I’m proud of myself and I’m proud of the Jewish people. And they should need to stick up for themselves because most of the world is against them.”
FORMER STARS SPEAK OUT
So, with such an obvious change, there’s one question in the radio industry the MSM simply will not tackle: What the hell is going on at LBC?
Its former top rated presenter Nigel Farage, until he was sacked for criticising Black Lives Matter in June 2020, sums up the despondency felt by many former fans who viewed LBC as a family.
“I had been an LBC listener since 1978 and regular caller. I loved my job there, until it abruptly ended. Since then the channel has become only for the metropolitan elite and leftists. Sad,” he told me this week.
Axed weekend presenter Maajid Nawaz was even more blunt, saying: “LBC masquerades as an independent media company when it is really a propaganda arm selling Britain out to globalists.”
Former Drive presenter James Whale said: “I think LBC have lost their way and they’re now stuck in this rut of everything is down to the terrible Tories and awful capitalism. And no one is remembering the fact that LBC is a commercial radio station and if they carry on like that then no one is going to advertise with them.”
But why has LBC taken this hate-filled, anti-English leftward turn? Is it to prepare for a Labour government? To deal with the increasingly woke advertising agencies? Or is there something more sinister going on?
MONEY AND INFLUENCE
One former star LBC presenter explained to me how Global Entertainment and Media, a business with £800 million in revenue in the last financial year run by Ashley Tabor, uses the talk station for political leverage.
They explained: “The key thing you’ve got to remember about LBC is that LBC isn’t about the listeners, which are going down since they went all woke. It’s about making money. Everything at LBC is leveraged by Global. It’s about having an influence on government. So everything is now being geared towards a Labour government. It’s not about anything else. The entire modus operandi is having influence over the government.”
Until this month, the likely foreign secretary in the almost inevitable next Labour government, David Lammy, was still hosting a weekend show.
Nawaz, who was axed from his own weekend show for his views challenging Covid authoritarianism, agrees there is a clear financial motive in the changing political position.
“Global-owned LBC has sold its soul to make money,” he said. “They are clearly interested in making profit while maintaining a liberal reputation for themselves, but they cannot do either of these without being totally beholden to the nakedly political agenda of their globalist overlords. As a result, profit and editorial 'independence' are tolerated but within strict boundaries.”
Another former presenter added: “LBC doesn’t make much money. What makes a lot of money is Global and the business. But you get that influence because you’ve got the ability to say: ‘Would you like a radio show?’ You’re not going to have front benchers slagging off your station when they want to come on to host a regular phone in.”
RIGHT WING PURGE
One thing is impossible to deny: The past decade has seen a purge of the station’s biggest right-wing presenters.
GONE:
Nigel Farage
Maajid Nawaz
Katie Hopkins
Ian Collins
Julia Hartley-Brewer
James Whale
Andrew Pierce
Bev Turner
Colin Brazier
They have been invariably replaced by cookie cutter BBC lefties like Andrew Marr, Eddie Mair, Matt Frei, Vanessa Feltz and Shelagh Fogerty, alongside firebrand extremists like the aforementioned Devon and Myska, and the increasingly unhinged Carol Vorderman, Matthew Wright and Marina Purkiss.
Ferrari and Dale – once clearly presenters on the right – have “read the room” and veered towards the centre ground to preserve their position, according to station insiders.
Like virtually all London-based broadcasters, LBC is predominantly staffed by young leftie producers. “There’s definitely an issue in terms of woke production staff trying to sabotage,” one presenter claims.
But multiple LBC insiders say the overall direction has been driven by James Rea, Global’s chief broadcasting and content officer, who is described as a “massive leftie”.
A former presenter said: “He’s the failed former editor of Newsbeat at the BBC who ended up moving back up north after screwing up Newsbeat, which of course is very much to the left. But was then brought in to run LBC and has ruined a great station.
“He’s laughed at by people there- I remember when he started he was so out of his depth he was sinking. He took weeks to come up with a ‘strategy’ for LBC… when we had a big company meeting about what his plans were he basically said LBC is the speech version of a music station and the calls were like hit singles. People were openly laughing
“So it’s definitely taken him ages to get across it all - but seemingly his strategy is now just to make it as left wing as possible.”
SANGITA SILENCED?
Rea’s most controversial decision has been taking the insufferable, low-energy broadcaster Myska off air, given she had become a darling of the hard left for her anti-Israel position.
But an LBC source told me: “She’s too much bother, she’s making news for the wrong reasons, she ain’t a big name, she’s expendable. Everyone is expendable. The ratings are only with a view to making money.”
Whale added: “Having Ms Myska on the air was actually quite good for those of us that take a different tack. Because if they ever said I was too outrageous, I’d just say: ‘Well we’re just balancing up from what they’re doing on LBC.’ But I’m not surprised she was taken off air. I think a lot of people like her have misread what the majority of the public actually feel. Look at what happened in Eurovision.”
However, Myska’s brutal removal from the schedule – she wasn’t allowed to finish her contract on air or say goodbye to listeners – has caused a real schism within the station’s new hard left base.
Presenters like O’Brien, Fogerty and Dale have unconvincingly tried to claim that Myska was only axed because of her low ratings, despite her boasting last year that her audience had hit record highs.
But Nawaz today forcefully responds to O’Brien, saying: “White-saviour James O'Brien seems to have a rather hypocritical habit of siding against uncontrollable ethnic minority broadcasters in favour of his corporate bosses. His kicking of Sangita Myska while she was down confirmed a pattern he had already established after he subjected me to a hate-filled and unprovoked tirade at London's Kettner's restaurant, where he told me to ‘fuck off and kill some more people’ after his bosses James Rea and Tom Cheal – who were with him that day too – had already deprived me of my family's only source of income by sacking me without notice over Twitter, for opposing all Covid mandates.”
“GLOBALIST TRAITORS TO BRITAIN”
O’Brien’s ego has exploded over the past decade, given he has gone from the only leftie in the daily schedule to a barometer of the station’s increasingly monotone political position.
But one presenter insisted the aura around him is a myth, saying: “No one has heard of him outside London. That’s the thing about him, he doesn’t translate outside that Westminster bubble. He’s gone for every big gig going outside of LBC but doesn’t get any of them because fundamentally he’s such a rude arrogant bastard.”
Nawaz believes the blame must be shared between O’Brien, Ferrari, Dale and Fogerty, who he brands as “globalist traitors to Britain”.
He says: “They betrayed their nation by propagandising for coerced and experimental medical injections used on the population, leading to death and injury. During Covid and whilst live on air, Nick Ferrari suggested introducing the fascist policy of cumulatively escalating fines against all those who remained unvaccinated.
“Iain Dale turned on me without warning by publicly abusing and smearing me because I opposed all Covid mandates, until I was sacked by LBC. Shelagh Fogerty said live on air that she wanted to poison the coffees of the unvaccinated, and also suggested via her social media ‘shooting’ January 6 protestors, just before Ashley Babbit was indeed shot in the Capitol.
“Such coordinated hate suggests more than just self-preservation. It suggests they are being advised on what to say and whom to target.”
By contrast, Whale, who proudly presented Drive for six years on LBC before returning to Talk Radio where he remains on air despite battling terminal cancer, looks back at his old employer more in sorrow than anger.
“It was a radical station then, it was really good,” he said. “But why have they decided to go down the left-wing path? Their management have gone woke. LBC thought they were becoming the station of the people but I think they misread how the public actually feel.”
That may be true, but given the control now exerted by London advertising agencies on the news media, expect LBC to continue on a woke, left-wing path, purging the odd extremist like Myska, while attempting to curry favour with a new Labour administration through propagandists like Vorderman and O’Brien.
It's yet more proof of why the UK mainstream media can no longer be trusted and independent journalists not influenced by billionaire businessmen or corrupt politicians are the future of honest reporting and broadcasting.
I stopped listening to LBC years ago. O'Brien was insufferable then and it was getting too predictable. I actually like hearing counter views - and balance - as it removes the need for an echo chamber but LBC was already turning into a circle jerk and O'Brien being a pri-k to anyone he did not approve of.
Even the mighty Ferrari was getting out of tune. You could see this with his arslikhan to certain minority groups - no doubt scared of being cancelled or called out.
In the end the bullshit to benefit quota got too high, so I left and cancelled the then paid-for LBC podcast access subscription too (it wasn't a lot - a few pounds a month but it let me download/timeshift).
I stopped listening when they axed Farage, then I only listened to Maajid’s brilliant show before he got unceremoniously sacked. Ferrari and Dale though; cringeworthy ass kissers with zero integrity just to keep their jobs.