Michael Grade Breaks Silence on Ofcom, GB News, and the Limits of Broadcast Impartiality
Grade Steps Out of the Regulator's Shadow
Michael Grade, Lord Grade of Yarmouth, stepped down as Ofcom chair in April 2024 after a four-year tenure — and within weeks had retaken the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, a move that crystallised the tension that had shadowed his time at the watchdog. He has since given a series of interviews defending GB News and offering a pointed critique of how Ofcom approaches broadcast impartiality — a critique that lands with particular weight given that he ran the institution he is now second-guessing.
In those interviews, Grade argued that mainstream broadcasters are "embarrassed" by GB News not because it breaks rules but because it pursues editorial territory — immigration, Brexit — that legacy outlets have historically underweighted. His view, as reported by The Guardian, is that the discomfort is competitive and cultural rather than regulatory. He also stated flatly that complying with broadcast rules is straightforward, positioning the compliance question as one of will rather than structural ambiguity.
The Regulatory Record in Dispute
The backdrop to Grade's comments is a protracted and contested enforcement history. Ofcom conducted formal investigations into GB News and found multiple breaches of the due impartiality provisions under the Broadcasting Code — obligations that apply to all Ofcom-licensed television and radio services. In May 2024, the regulator found the channel in breach specifically over an interview featuring a serving politician, a finding that Ofcom indicated could attract a formal sanction.
Then, on 13 March 2025, Ofcom withdrew three breach decisions against GB News, along with a separate "not pursued" decision dated 18 March 2024. The withdrawal followed a High Court judgment in the GB News v Ofcom litigation, the terms of which reshaped the regulatory picture considerably. Ofcom's public statement confirmed the reversals without conceding any systemic failure in its approach, but the procedural retreat handed GB News a significant vindication — at least on the specific decisions that were pulled.
That sequence matters. Grade's defence of GB News was made while enforcement proceedings were live and his own institutional fingerprints were still on Ofcom's approach. The High Court's subsequent intervention complicates any simple narrative about which side had the better of the argument.
What Impartiality Rules Actually Require
For the specialists reading this: the due impartiality framework under Section 5 of the Broadcasting Code is not a neutrality mandate in the colloquial sense. It does not require equal time or a prohibition on strong editorial voices. It requires that, on matters of political or industrial controversy and matters of public policy, a licensed broadcaster presents a range of significant views — either within a single programme or across a series of programmes taken as a whole. The rules are more elastic than they are often characterised, which is precisely what Grade appears to be arguing when he says compliance is not complicated.
Where the framework becomes contested is at the boundary between a presenter expressing a robust opinion and a programme systematically platforming one political position without adequate counterweight. GB News, which launched in 2021 with an explicitly differentiated editorial proposition, has repeatedly tested that boundary — and Ofcom's enforcement record suggests the regulator judged, at least in some cases, that the line had been crossed. The High Court's partial reversal of those findings means the question of where exactly the line sits remains genuinely unsettled.
The Wider Institutional Stakes
We have seen this pattern before, when former regulators — whether in financial services, telecommunications, or broadcasting — speak out after departure in ways that reframe the institution's record on their watch. The dynamic is rarely straightforward: sometimes it is self-exculpation, sometimes genuine conviction, sometimes both at once. Grade's rapid return to the Conservative benches makes the attributional question sharper than usual, though it does not settle it. His substantive claim — that legacy broadcasters' discomfort with GB News reflects editorial defensiveness rather than principled rule-enforcement — is one that deserves engagement on its merits, separate from his political identity.
The institutional stakes here extend beyond one channel. Ofcom's credibility as a content regulator depends in part on its enforcement decisions surviving judicial review. When three breach findings are withdrawn following a High Court ruling, the question is not merely whether the decisions were procedurally flawed but whether the underlying interpretation of the impartiality standard was sound. If the standard is more permissive than Ofcom's enforcement practice implied, the effect flows across all licensees, not just GB News. Any broadcaster calculating its editorial risk exposure in the current environment will be watching how Ofcom responds — whether it revises its guidance, defends its methodology, or quietly recalibrates.
Grade's Tenure: A Contested Balance Sheet
Grade was appointed Ofcom Board Chair designate on 1 May 2022. His tenure coincided with the most intense period of GB News's regulatory turbulence, and he leaves behind an enforcement record that is now partially reversed and a public debate about the regulator's posture that he himself has fuelled.
None of that makes him wrong. The argument that mainstream broadcasting has a structural blind spot on certain high-salience political topics — immigration volumes, the practical consequences of Brexit — is not a claim unique to the political right, and it is not disproved by the fact of grade being a Conservative peer. The empirical question of whether GB News's editorial choices reflect genuine market demand for underserved coverage, or a commercially motivated political tilt, is separable from the regulatory question of whether those choices crossed Ofcom's statutory threshold.
What Grade's interventions have done is ensure the debate is conducted in public, with a named interlocutor who carries institutional authority. That is not nothing, in a media policy environment that often resolves these arguments in correspondence between lawyers.
What Comes Next
Ofcom now operates in a post-High Court environment where its impartiality enforcement toolkit has been tested and found, in at least some applications, wanting. The practical question for the regulator is whether to revise the operational framework for applying Section 5 findings, to appeal further where it believes the legal reasoning is wrong, or to proceed cautiously while the jurisprudence settles. For GB News, the partial vindication is real but bounded — withdrawn decisions do not erase the channel's broader compliance history, and the channel remains under a licence that carries ongoing obligations.
Grade, for his part, is no longer in the building. But in media and regulatory policy, former chairs do not simply disappear; they shift the terms of debate. His claim that compliance is straightforward is either a rebuke to GB News's critics, a rebuke to Ofcom's own enforcement culture, or both. The High Court's intervention suggests the second reading cannot be dismissed.
