My BBC Complaint About Chris Packham’s Daily Sceptic Slur

Chris Packham says at the end of this clip that the Daily Sceptic is put together by people with close connections to the oil industry. A flat out lie. None of the editors have any such connections. You’d think someone so quick to sue others for libel would be more cautious. https://t.co/K2gkh6p128

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) April 21, 2024

Here’s the text of my complaint:

On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 21st April 2024, Chris Packham, a BBC personality (ex-presenter of Springwatch, presenter of forthcoming Inside Our Minds), said the following when challenged by Luke Johnson about what evidence he had that extreme weather events are caused by carbon emissions:

“It doesn’t come from Toby Young’s Daily Septic [sic], which is basically put together by a bunch of professionals with close affiliations to the fossil fuel industry. It comes from something called science.” This is both false and defamatory. I am the editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic, a news publishing site, and neither I nor any of the other people who put it together have any affiliations to the fossil fuel industry, close or otherwise.

I have never been paid money by any fossil fuel companies, nor has the editor, Dr Will Jones, and we’ve never run an ad on the site from any fossil fuel companies. Chris Packham was not challenged by anyone on the programme about this false allegation, even though it’s extremely serious and damaging, effectively claiming the people who put together the Daily Sceptic are corrupt, i.e., paid to publish climate contrarian articles by the fossil fuel industry.

On the contrary, a clip of Chris Packham making this false and defamatory allegation was posted by BBC Politics on X and then retweeted by Laura Kuenssberg and as of the time of writing (11.15am on 25th April 2024) had been viewed over 850,000 times. The tweet hasn’t been deleted even though I pointed out on X that it was false on 21st April, quoting the original tweet.

For Chris Packham to make such a false and defamatory allegation is particularly egregious since he sued the editor and sub-editor of Country Squire magazine for libel last year. After the judge ruled in his favour, ordering the defendants to pay £90,000 in damages (and far more than that in costs), Packham talked about the harm that such allegations can cause and called for ‘hate speech’ – by which he meant false and defamatory allegations about him – to be criminalised:

Speaking outside court, Mr Packham said online abuse and hate crimes were a “vile part of modern life”.

He said it “ruins lives, livelihoods, reputations, it disrupts young peoples’ educations, causes incalculable mental health problems and tragically causes people to take their own lives”.

“As it stands the criminal law is simply not there to protect us from such hate – something that must change.”

If Packham sincerely believes that a false and defamatory allegation “causes incalculable mental health problems and tragically causes people to take their own lives”, why is he making such an allegation about me and the other people who put together the Daily Sceptic? And does he believe he should be sent to prison for committing this sin? Or is it one rule for climate activists and another for climate contrarians?

You can read more about my efforts to hold Packham to account in my Spectator column today, as well as in Steerpike and on Guido.