It's going to be a disaster

 I don't want to sound 'woke', but it is almost as if the poor man was bullied. 

Andrew Neil has turned to Rebecca Hardy of The Daily Mail for the inside story of his tearful time at GB News.  Rebecca worked for Andrew as deputy editor then editor of The Scotsman over 20 months at the turn of the century. 

'I came close to a breakdown', says Andrew.

'Live TV is stressful at the best of times but not knowing whether or not the technology would work… It just got worse and worse. At one stage, we were waiting to go on air and the whole system went down. It had to be rebooted and we only managed it with 15 seconds to spare.

‘That stress was just huge. It meant you couldn’t think about the journalism. You were just constantly wondering: “Will we make it through the hour?” By the end of that first week, I knew I had to get out. It was really beginning to affect my health. I wasn’t sleeping. I was waking up at two or three in the morning.

‘I had a constant knot in my stomach. When I did wake up I’d feel fine, then remember all the problems I had with GB News and this knot would come and wouldn’t leave me for the whole day.

'I do feel angry though about what they’ve done to a beautiful dream. This was a vision that might have worked. But if you watch the constant themes that come through again and again from the shock jockeys on GB News, the perception is “we hate migrants, we hate the NHS, we hate lockdown and we hate Meghan Markle”.

 ‘When I do look back, the one thing I will say is I wish I’d been more publicly demonstrative about not launching on June 13. It wouldn’t have stopped the launch and it wouldn’t have stopped the s***-show that followed, but I would have been on the record saying: “Don’t do this. It’s going to be a disaster.” ’