James Delingpole and I had a blazing row on our weekly podcast on Monday. We were discussing the recent departure of Mark Steyn from GB News following a bust-up over his contract. Mark has been hosting a show on the channel for over a year, but took a break in December after suffering two heart attacks. When he was ready to return last month, GB News asked him to sign a contract which would have made his company liable for any fines imposed by Ofcom as a result of a ‘regulatory breach’ unless he and his producers agreed to ‘incorporate Ofcom regulatory input’ into the show. He refused and accused GB News of presenting him with a fait accompli that he couldn’t accept.

James thinks Mark is the victim of a ‘manifest injustice’ and I should be taking up the cudgels on his behalf, given that I think of myself a free-speech zealot. But I’m not convinced this is a free-speech issue, at least not yet.

First let’s deal with the question of whether GB News has breached Mark’s speech rights. I should begin by saying I think Mark’s a terrific broadcaster. One of the things which makes him so good is his unwillingness to bend the knee to anyone – he is absolutely fearless. That’s why The Mark Steyn Show, which I sometimes appeared on, was such compelling viewing and regularly beat other news channels in its time slot. When it came to the most controversial issues of the day – Covid vaccines, the war in Ukraine, net zero – he didn’t just challenge the prevailing orthodoxy; he beat it to a pulp and then tossed it out with the rubbish.

Great television, but not always Ofcom-compliant television. Which created a bit of a headache for GB News. The regulator is investigating complaints about two of Mark’s shows, one from April in which he claimed that some statistics published by the UK Health Security Agency showed the triple-jabbed are more likely to die from Covid than the unvaccinated, and another from October in which he interviewed the American author Naomi Wolf, who described the rollout of the vaccines as ‘mass murder’. If those complaints are upheld, GB News could face significant fines. In 2008, for instance, Ofcom fined ITV £5,675,000 for breaching the Broadcasting Code. Even more seriously, Ofcom could withdraw GB News’s broadcasting licence if it concludes the channel isn’t taking the code seriously, as it did Russia Today’s.

It’s understandable, therefore, that GB News took steps to mitigate those risks. It wasn’t asking Mark to indemnify it for any losses arising from the ongoing investigations – just from future investigations if he and his producers didn’t follow the advice of the channel’s compliance officer. I don’t think making this a condition of Mark’s show continuing, given the regulatory environment it’s operating in, was a breach of his speech rights.

What about Ofcom? Is it, as James maintains, trying to suppress dissent? I thought the ‘coronavirus guidance’ it issued in March 2020, which cautioned broadcasters about giving too much air time to critics of the government’s public health guidance, was censorious, and the pro-free-speech organisation I run tried to challenge that guidance in the High Court. A judge refused our application for a judicial review, but I like to think we stayed Ofcom’s hand, making it more tolerant of sceptics than it would have been. Yes, it’s investigating complaints against Mark’s show, but it hasn’t tried to stop GB News drawing attention to vaccine injuries or featuring guests who robustly challenge the dominant narrative about Covid. For instance, it received dozens of complaints about an interview Dan Wootton did with Andrew Tate in which the controversial TikTok star played down the severity of the disease, but declined to investigate.

It may be legitimate to criticise Ofcom for holding GB News to a higher bar than other broadcasters. It hasn’t upheld any complaints about, say, the BBC for failing to challenge guests making misleading claims about the efficacy of the vaccines when they were first rolled out. But it hasn’t upheld any complaints against GB News either, so it would be premature to accuse it of double standards. There may yet be a fight worth having about that, but we need to wait and see what Ofcom does before taking up arms.

The bottom line is that a clash between Mark Steyn and the regulator was inevitable, given his take-no-prisoners style, and GB News made the only decision it could when faced with a choice about whose side to take. I’m sorry to see Mark leave the channel, but he will continue to broadcast his show on his website, where he can safely ignore Ofcom’s rules.