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🚨 We need to talk about Sir Ian Cheshire... In June 2026, he became chair of @Ofcom, the regulator responsible for broadcasting, telecoms, the post and, increasingly, the online world. Four months later, he gave MPs a revealing glimpse of how he sees the job. I’m concerned. I think you should be too. On 20 October, appearing before the Commons culture committee for the first time in the role, he was asked why the regulator seemed unable to get to grips with GB News. Labour’s @RupaHuq named some of the channel’s critics: Andrew Neil, its founding chairman, who walked away from it; the former ITN editor Stewart Purvis; and Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founding director of standards and the author of its first broadcasting code. None of them, she pointed out, is of the left. Cheshire replied that Ofcom also has a duty to protect free speech. When Huq pressed him, he said he would encourage “Stewart and the others to set up a left-wing version of GB News”. Huq said she would oppose that channel too. Later in the session the Conservative MP Nigel Huddleston returned to the remark: “God help us if that happens.” It was a very revealing moment. Faced with concerns from a former ITN editor and the man who wrote Ofcom’s own rulebook, the regulator’s new chair treated a question of law and evidence as a quarrel between left and right, to be settled by giving each side its own channel. Due impartiality, the principle Ofcom exists to uphold, has no place in that picture. It was also, frankly, an embarrassing thing for the chair of a regulator to say. Britain’s national press is concentrated in very few hands: according to the Media Reform Coalition, three companies, DMG Media, News UK and Reach, control 90 per cent of national newspaper circulation. From the Harmsworths and Beaverbrook to Murdoch, the Barclay brothers and now Paul Marshall, proprietors have almost always leaned right and used their titles to court and influence those in power. Proprietors have very occasionally backed Labour when it suited them, most famously Murdoch’s Sun under Tony Blair. The best-known proprietor of recent decades to call himself a socialist was Robert Maxwell, a former Labour MP who owned the Mirror from 1984 until his death in 1991. Yet Paul Foot, who wrote for the Mirror under him, said he “broke the unions like a Tory”, and he went on to raid his own papers’ pension funds. Inviting critics to set up a left-wing GB News assumes a left-wing Paul Marshall is waiting in the wings. There isn’t one. Cheshire’s answer treats an imbalance of ownership and capital as if it were simply an imbalance of opinion. In my view, Cheshire’s appointment was a mistake, made at the worst possible moment. His background gives little reason to expect a robust approach to broadcasting standards, his attention is spread across too many boards, and what he has said about GB News since taking office suggests nothing will change. Cheshire is what the Financial Times, reporting him as frontrunner in April, called a “City grandee”. He ran Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q, from 2008 to 2015, and has since chaired Barclays UK, Debenhams, Spire Healthcare and the property giant Landsec, as well as sitting on the board of BT. He was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours, on David Cameron’s list. His only substantial broadcasting experience is three years as chair of Channel 4, from 2022 to 2025. He has never held an executive role at a broadcaster or a technology platform. In fairness, his Channel 4 record deserves credit. Nadine Dorries approved his appointment while she was pushing to privatise the broadcaster, and Labour’s Lucy Powell accused her of installing a “yes man” for the sell-off. He is instead generally seen to have helped Channel 4 see off privatisation, and, according to the Telegraph, Michael Grade, then chair of Ofcom and a Conservative peer until he resigned the whip to take that job, declined to give him a second term. Defending a public broadcaster you chair is a different task, though, from holding a partisan commercial channel to account. He got the Ofcom job after being sounded out by someone at No 10, as he told MPs in May, though he would not say who. He beat Labour’s Margaret Hodge and the former Conservative culture secretary Sir Jeremy Wright. The science committee endorsed him but urged him to prioritise improving his knowledge of online safety. At that hearing he admitted he had not even read the Rycroft review, which warns that too little is known about dark money in British media, and when Liam Byrne asked whether that was Ofcom’s responsibility, he replied that he did not know yet. For £120,000 a year and three days a week, the public is entitled to expect more preparation. Cheshire is no party politician. I can find no record of party membership or donations, and he was described as pro-Remain at the time of the referendum. His career has instead been spent moving between boardrooms and Whitehall. Conservative-led governments have turned to him again and again. In 2011 Iain Duncan Smith appointed him lead non-executive at the Department for Work and Pensions, as it embarked on the coalition’s welfare reforms. David Cameron made him the government’s lead non-executive in 2015, a job designed to bring boardroom governance into Whitehall, and Theresa May reappointed him in 2018. In 2022 Nadine Dorries approved him as chair of Channel 4. In 2024 he was the Conservative government’s preferred candidate to chair the Climate Change Committee, in what the Telegraph described as an attempt to install more moderate leadership after Lord Deben. Ministers in all three devolved governments refused to approve the shortlist, saying its candidates were too close to the Conservatives and lacked diversity, and the Guardian reported accusations that Westminster was trying to “blunt the teeth” of the watchdog. The government insisted it had found a credible chair. His other public work points the same way: in 2013 he sat on Cameron’s business taskforce on cutting EU “red tape”, and he chaired the Ecosystem Markets Task Force, which looked for business opportunities in valuing and protecting nature. His boardroom career fits the pattern: from 2021 until this autumn he chaired Spire Healthcare, Britain’s biggest private hospital group, which earns around 30% of its hospital revenue treating #NHS patients. Taken together, it is the record of a market-minded businessman whom Conservative ministers trusted, repeatedly, to bring business methods into government. That role raises at least one question that has never been answered. In 2018 Michael Gove appointed Ben Goldsmith, a donor to the Conservatives and occasionally the Greens, to Defra’s board after a selection process overseen by Cheshire. Goldsmith ran Menhaden Capital Management, which managed the investment trust Menhaden Capital plc, and the Cabinet Office’s register of interests listed Cheshire as that trust’s chairman. I have found no public record of whether he declared the connection or stood aside. None of this makes him a Conservative placeman. But it does place him in a small circle of business figures whom governments of every colour reach for, and Labour deserves as much criticism for that as the Conservatives. In 2022 Labour’s frontbench accused the Conservatives of cronyism over his Channel 4 appointment. Four years later, a Labour government chose him to chair the regulator itself, over one of its own peers. It fell to a Labour backbencher, Rupa Huq, to press him in public on GB News. Then there is the question of time. The Ofcom chair is expected to commit just three days a week. Cheshire joined the board on 9 June. On 14 July he was appointed chair of Anglian Water. He has since given up the chair of Spire Healthcare and will leave the Mountbatten hospice charity in December. He still chairs Landsec, the Institute for Government and the King Charles III Charitable Fund. When Chi Onwurah, chair of the science committee, asked him in May how he would manage Ofcom alongside his other chairs, he had not yet taken on a water company. Anglian is a company under intense scrutiny. LBC reported in July that it recorded more than 1,000 pollution incidents in 2025, the highest total for any water company in more than a decade. In September 2025 it agreed a £62.8m enforcement package with Ofwat over failures in running its sewage works and networks, and in July it introduced its first hosepipe ban since 2012, three days before he arrived. Its chief executive received an extra £1.3m, including a £500,000 retention payment, despite the ban on bonuses at failing water firms; the company says shareholders funded it and that it complies with the rules. Cheshire inherited all of this and is not responsible for it. Even so, at a time when Ofcom needs its chair’s full attention, he chose to take on a company in a sector that has become a byword for regulatory failure. On GB News, the evidence so far points to continuity. GB News’s parent company, All Perspectives Ltd, has two main owners: the Dubai-based Legatum group and Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge fund co-founder who also owns The Spectator and UnHerd. Each owns around 40% of the company. In May, Liam Byrne noted that its presenters included the leader of a political party and seven sitting MPs, all from one side. The senior world of broadcasting and regulation is a small one, and Ofcom’s leaders inevitably have ties within it. Grade, as he told the Telegraph, came out as a Tory only in 2010, the year before he became a Conservative peer. Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive since 2020, is a career civil servant, and there is no evidence that her decisions reflect anything other than her own judgement. Her husband, Benedict Brogan, was political editor of the Daily Mail and later deputy editor of the Telegraph. Since leaving journalism in 2014 he has worked in corporate public affairs, including at the firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, and since April has advised financial services clients at FTI Consulting, a sector Ofcom does not regulate. None of this proves bias, and I make no such claim. Ofcom’s register of interests already covers partners, and that kind of transparency is what keeps such connections from becoming a story. A month before stepping down, Michael Grade told the Telegraph there was “no blurring of news and comment” on GB News, and that politician presenters were a matter for Parliament. In my view that claim is absurd, and Ofcom’s own lawyers had argued the opposite: in the High Court in 2025, Ofcom’s case, as the judge summarised it, was that challenger broadcasters such as GB News were “blending news and comment content, in an unprecedented manner”. Ministers reportedly wanted a successor with a different profile. Six months later, Ofcom under Cheshire is saying much the same. At the October hearing he argued that Ofcom regulates individual programmes rather than whole channels, and that this has been tested in law. Dawes added that whether serving politicians should present current affairs is for politicians to decide. That is a retreat. In May he told MPs that GB News was “literally the second question on my induction plan”, suggested that with the code last revised five years earlier this “may be the time to ask ourselves again”, and asked whether the rules on politician presenters were “something we should address”. By October, programme-level regulation “currently works”, and anything more is for Parliament. In my view, handing the question to Parliament is an abdication. Parliament gave Ofcom, not ministers or MPs, the duty under the Communications Act 2003 to set the Broadcasting Code and “from time to time to review and revise” it, so that news is presented with due impartiality. It also gave Ofcom the power to report questions of general broadcasting policy to the Secretary of State. Dawes herself told the same committee that Ofcom’s primary duty is to further the interests of citizens, and that this is written into the Act. Ofcom must weigh freedom of expression and editorial independence: weighing them is its job. Leaving politicians to decide whether politicians may front television programmes hands the question to the interested party. When Huq listed GB News’s critics, Cheshire’s first reply was that Ofcom also has a duty on free speech. Earlier in the session, Dawes had said Ofcom sets very few rules in advance “because of freedom of expression”. Nobody should want a censorious regulator, and freedom of expression is a duty Ofcom must take seriously. Too often, though, the argument is reduced to a simplistic, unhelpful binary in which any rule is censorship and any restraint an attack on liberty. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the basis of free expression in UK law, says the right “carries with it duties and responsibilities”, and expressly allows states to license broadcasters. Impartiality rules silence no one: they set conditions on how a licensed broadcaster presents news and political controversy, and anyone unwilling to meet them is free to publish online. As George Lakoff has long argued, whoever sets the frame shapes the debate, and a regulator that treats “free speech” as a trump card has let one side set it. The harder and more honest question is how to protect open debate while limiting the partisan distortion that can drive people further apart. Perhaps most revealing was what Cheshire volunteered about the broadcaster itself. He told MPs he had taken time out to meet GB News to understand its compliance effort. He conceded it had started “very chaotically”, with its technical transmissions all over the place, but said it had invested in compliance and was “moving in the right direction”. “Right”, critics might say, being the operative word. He offered that public reassurance while Ofcom was still investigating one of the channel’s interviews with Donald Trump, and still defending its £100,000 fine against GB News in court. He did not say when the meeting took place or who attended, no MP asked, and I can find no public record of it. A regulator’s chair who meets a broadcaster, then vouches for it in Parliament while his own organisation is still investigating it, owes the public a full account of that meeting. In May, when MPs complained that Ofcom would not say whom it meets, he promised to take the point on board. This would be a good place to start. In May he also told MPs he intended to meet @arusbridger, whose investigation for The New World had criticised Ofcom’s handling of GB News; I can find no record of whether he did. In 2025 GB News overturned Ofcom’s rulings on two episodes of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation, after the High Court found errors in how Ofcom had interpreted its rules on politicians presenting news. That judgment turned on the difference between news and current affairs programmes; it did not rule on whether Ofcom can judge a channel as a whole. The judge pointed to Ofcom’s duty to revise its own code as the proper route for any change. Ofcom consulted on tightening the rules on politician presenters, then kept them as they were and strengthened only its guidance. Ofcom points to 24 investigations into GB News as proof it is not asleep, and the courts have narrowed its room for manoeuvre: the Telegraph reported that GB News’s win was the first time Ofcom had lost a legal challenge to one of its broadcasting decisions. The programme-by-programme approach is long-standing. The problem is a chair who treats it as the whole answer, when it cannot capture what a channel adds up to. In my view, GB News is something close to a British Fox News: built around opinion, fronted by politicians from one party, and owned by one of the country’s most influential right-wing media proprietors. Ofcom regulates the tech platforms under the Online Safety Act and broadcasters under the Communications Act, so the two jobs are not identical, and the courts have already narrowed the broadcasting rules. Even so, the difference in his tone is striking. According to Computing’s report of an interview Cheshire gave the Financial Times in August, he argued for greater digital sovereignty, so that what British citizens see online is not shaped mainly by American or Chinese interests, and indicated that Ofcom would seek new powers where necessary. Pressed on free speech, he said Ofcom was “protecting our citizens”. In October he called Ofcom’s legal battles with Meta “a great calling card to recruit new lawyers”. Faced with GB News, co-owned by Paul Marshall, the same chair treated free speech as a reason to hold back. Yet the concern behind his sovereignty argument, a few powerful owners shaping what citizens see and hear, applies whatever the owners’ nationality, and GB News is a case in point. The framing is telling. Ownership is not someone else’s problem, either. Newspapers sit largely outside Ofcom’s day-to-day regulation, but it has a statutory duty to secure sufficient plurality in television and radio, must review the media ownership rules at least every three years, and advises ministers when media mergers raise public interest concerns. The press barons own broadcasters too. Murdoch’s News UK runs TalkRadio and talkSPORT, as well as Talk, which left linear television for streaming in 2024. Marshall co-owns GB News and also owns The Spectator and UnHerd, giving one man a stake across television, a political weekly and online commentary. Ofcom itself recommended, in 2021 and again in 2024, widening the public interest test for media mergers beyond newspapers and broadcasters. When Liam Byrne raised the opacity of GB News’s funding in May, Cheshire said that as a citizen he would be worried, but that he had not yet done the homework. Five months into the job, he should have. The rules also stop at the edge of the television. The Broadcasting Code covers licensed TV and radio services. When Talk left linear television in 2024, its online video ceased to be covered by the Broadcasting Code, although much of its schedule still airs in TalkRadio’s slot, which remains licensed. Ofcom’s existing rules for on-demand services, where they apply, contain no impartiality requirements. Clips of GB News programmes on @X or @YouTube are not broadcasts at all. A segment balanced within a programme on air can be clipped, stripped of that balance and shared widely, and the code does not follow it. The Online Safety Act also excludes qualifying news publisher content from the user-generated content that platforms’ safety duties cover, and that can include a licensed broadcaster’s own clips, provided the statutory conditions are met. Print and online titles are blurring the line from the other direction. At the time of writing, SpectatorTV, The Spectator’s YouTube channel, has more than half a million subscribers and nearly 4,000 videos, and the magazine’s own media pack describes daily shows and calls its newest programmes “broadcast shows”. UnHerd’s channel also has more than half a million subscribers, and national newspapers have followed on a far larger scale: the Telegraph’s channel has more than six million subscribers and some 37,000 videos, including long-form political interviews and livestreamed debates. None of it falls under the Broadcasting Code, and political podcasts and YouTube shows that look and sound like news face no impartiality rules at all, as Dawes acknowledged in October. Reform UK’s planned “Reform TV”, a YouTube-based channel financed by a recent £72 million donation windfall and intended to feature interviews, documentaries and party-aligned programming, would sit entirely outside the Broadcasting Code for the same reason. The Media Act 2024 will bring the biggest streamers under a new code, with impartiality rules for news. Ofcom consulted on it this summer and plans to publish the final version in late 2026; it will apply to services with more than 500,000 monthly UK users, such as Netflix and ITVX, and services will have a year to comply. Whether it will reach Talk, The Spectator’s video shows or political channels on YouTube is unclear. Cheshire himself spotted the problem in May, telling MPs that clipped content on social media raised the question of whether the rules hang together “as a coherent piece of regulation”. But he did not return to it in October. The stakes are real. In the United States, the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987 removed a duty on licensed broadcasters to air contrasting views. It never applied to cable channels such as Fox News, which launched in 1996, but it was part of a wider shift towards a media system in which millions live inside partisan information. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government spent years capturing public-service media and building a network of loyal private outlets, through ownership, regulatory pressure and state advertising. Britain is not Hungary, and GB News is a privately owned channel with no state control. Both examples still show that media pluralism cannot be judged one programme at a time. Here, MPs on the science committee have examined how online misinformation fed the riots that followed the Southport murders in 2024. Broadcast regulation is one of the few levers a democracy has over the quality of its information, and Ofcom holds it. Cheshire can still prove me wrong, and I sincerely hope he does. First, he should publish the online safety review he told MPs in October was finished, and deliver the performance measures the science committee asked to see within six months of his appointment. Ofcom already publishes his outside interests, but he ought to go further, explaining how conflicts between those roles and Ofcom’s work are managed and recording any occasion on which he has stood aside. Every meeting he holds with a broadcaster Ofcom is investigating should be published, with its date and attendees, beginning with GB News. On the bigger questions, he should use Ofcom’s next review of the media ownership rules, due by 2027, to argue for a plurality regime fit for an era of billionaire-owned broadcasters, and tell Parliament how licensed broadcasters’ own online output can be held to the standards that apply on air. Above all, Ofcom should use its own power to revise the Broadcasting Code for an age of politician presenters. If it will not, and keeps telling MPs that channel-wide impartiality and politician presenters are matters for Parliament, then Parliament should take it at its word and legislate. A regulator’s chair who answers serious criticism by inviting the critics to start a partisan channel of their own has misunderstood the job. What Britain needs is a watchdog that believes accurate, impartial news is essential for a well-functioning democracy and worth defending, led by a chair with the time and the conviction to defend it.