Former Sinn Féin leader sued broadcaster over allegation in documentary that he sanctioned murder of MI5 informant
Gerry Adams has won a defamation action against the BBC over a documentary that carried a claim he sanctioned the murder of an MI5 informant in 2006.
A jury at Dublin’s high court on Friday found that the BBC had not acted in good faith or in a fair and reasonable way and awarded the former Sinn Féin leader €100,000 (£84,000) in damages
The verdict came after a high-profile four-week trial that scrutinised Adams’s alleged membership of the IRA and his role during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and peace process.
Lawyers for Adams accused the BBC of a “grievous smear” and “hatchet job”. Lawyers for the broadcaster defended the documentary and said the libel action was a cynical attempt to launder Adams’s reputation.
The former West Belfast MP said a BBC Spotlight documentary and accompanying online article defamed him in 2016 by claiming he had sanctioned the murder of Denis Donaldson, a former Sinn Féin official who was shot dead in County Donegal months after admitting he had for decades been a police and MI5 informant. The claim about Adams was made by an anonymous source known only as “Martin”.
The right-wing multi-millionaire, who also owns The Spectator, called for the public broadcaster to be part-privatised at a Pharos Foundation event.
GB News co-owner Paul Marshall speaking at the Pharos Foundation on 20 May 2025. Credit: Pharos Foundation / YouTube
A hedge fund manager who owns three right-wing UK media outlets has called for the BBC to be “broken up” and its fact-checking service “shut down”.
Sir Paul Marshall – proprietor of GB News, The Spectator, and Unherd – was speaking last week (20 May) at the Pharos Foundation, an educational charity that received £350,000 from Marshall’s charity Sequoia Trust in 2023.
Pharos co-founder and director Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, a climate science denial campaign group, is a significant backer of Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.
In his speech, titled ‘Reflections of an Accidental Media Owner’, Marshall said: “the BBC squats like a giant toad in the middle of the UK media landscape”, calling it “a propaganda arm of the state, who [sic] are ultimately its paymasters.”
The multi-millionaire, who runs the hedge fund Marshall Wace, added that “the BBC should be broken up” to separate its “public service elements” like news and documentaries from “entertainment, drama, sport”, adding: “The latter should be privatised and allowed to complete to compete with other entertainment companies.”
Marshall also took aim at BBC Verify, the corporation’s fact-checking service founded in 2023 to cover and debunk online misinformation, calling for the service to be “shut down”.
Marshall accused progressive groups like Stop Funding Hate, HOPE not hate, and Led by Donkeys of acting like “school yard bullies” on social media.
“Unfortunately most of the disinformation agents who seek to track sites or individuals under the misinformation rubric have an explicit or near explicit left-wing agenda,” Marshall said. “This very much includes BBC Verify which is frankly an abuse of taxpayer money and should be shut down.”
GB News has accused of spreading misleading information – includingconspiracy theories – since it launched in June 2021, and has been regularly probed by broadcast regulator Ofcom.
In February 2024, HOPE not hate revealed that Marshall had been liking and retweeting posts on X expressing a wide variety of anti-Muslim views, including a post that called for the “mass expulsions” of refugees. Responding to HOPE not hate, a representative for Marshall said: “He posts on a wide variety of subjects and those cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of over 5,000 posts. This sample does not represent his views.”
As DeSmog has reported, GB News frequently platforms individuals who deny basic climate science, while its guests and presenters attacked climate action nearly 1,000 times in the immediate run-up and aftermath of the 2024 general election.
BBC Verify has debunked false claims about climate issues, including whether the UK is meeting its net zero targets, on the supposed need for new North Sea oil and gas extraction, and false claims about extreme weather events.
As DeSmog has revealed, Marshall’s hedge fund Marshall Wace had billions invested in fossil fuels as of June 2023. One of its major investors, the private equity giant KKR, which is tipped to buy Thames Water, is itself a significant fossil fuel investor.
Richard Wilson, founder of Stop Funding Hate, told DeSmog: “A fossil fuel magnate is pushing for the break-up of the BBC – and lobbying for its fact-checking service to be shut down – while bankrolling a TV channel that pumps out toxic misinformation on climate change.
“GB News has lost over £100 million as advertisers continue to steer clear. So it’s understandable that the channel’s owner would want to lash out at Stop Funding Hate supporters. But we’re happy to take these attacks as a badge of honour – and another sign that our campaigning is working.”
His attacks on the BBC echo those of Reform UK, whose leader Nigel Farage receives a six-figure salary to host his own show on GB News.
Reform’s manifesto for the 2024 election included a pledge to scrap the BBC licence fee, labelling the broadcaster “institutionally biased” and “wasteful”.
“Marshall and his professional disinfluencers know they’ve utterly lost the fight on facts, and instead of being correct, they’ve started attacking the fact checking referees at the BBC,” said Philip Newell, communications co-chair of the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition.
“In a healthy democracy, unbiased news is a vital tool of holding the rich accountable – which is exactly why one part of the disinformation playbook is to attack fact checkers and media institutions that speak truth to power. That an oily hedge fund baron has attacked the BBC only further confirms its validity and value.”
More recently, Donald Trump’s administration in the U.S. cut government funding for public broadcasters NPR and PBS, accusing them of bias.
The Pharos Foundation, which offers “Marshall fellowships” in Sir Paul’s honour, is also politically connected.
Pharos director Neil Record donated £10,000 and the use of office space to Kemi Badenoch’s campaign for the Tory leadership last autumn. Badenoch stayed at Record’s Gloucestershire estate in February ahead of a flagship speech attacking net zero targets.
Record is chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which claims carbon dioxide emissions are “not pollution” and could be a “benefit” to the planet.
He is also a life vice president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an anti-regulation think tank that has received funding from the oil giant BP.
Pharos was also co-founded by historian Nigel Biggar, who was nominated for a peerage by Badenoch in late 2024.
After purchasing The Spectator in September 2024 for £100 million, Marshall appointed former Conservative Party Cabinet minister Michael Gove as its editor.
Gove is the founder of think tank Policy Exchange, whose head of political economy James Vitali is a current Pharos research fellow. Marshall donated £890,000 to Policy Exchange between 2020 and 2023.
The chair of Pharos’ development committee, Sian Hansen, until recently worked as chief operating officer at CT Group, the lobbying firm that has represented the Prosperity Institute (formerly known as the Legatum Institute), whose funder the Legatum Group co-owns GB News with Paul Marshall.
CT Group has lobbied on behalf of oil and gas companies, and its clients have included the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association and BHP, which has mining and oil assets.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
MORE than 50 activists disrupted Drax’s annual investor meeting in London today, bringing proceedings to a halt for an hour.
The firm operates a wood-burning power plant in Yorkshire, which has received some £6 billion in green subsidies, while operating as Britain’s largest carbon emitter.
Despite a BBC investigation finding that it has burned wood from rare forests in Canada, the firm is set to continue to receive taxpayer money until at least 2031.
Activists blocked the entrance to the venue, preventing shareholders from entering, and dropped a large banner reading “Drax Kills.”
Inside, activists physically disrupted proceedings, rushing to the stage shouting “Drax kills,” before the meeting was forced to close.
Axe Drax spokesperson Sam Johnson said: “We’ve seen over the last year repeated desperate attempts from Drax to silence dissent — from spending millions working with the police to shut down peaceful protest, to silencing whistleblowers. “
The BBC has stopped Evan Davis, one of its senior presenters, from hosting a personal podcast informing the public about heat pumps, a flagship clean heating solution.
Speaking on the final episode of the show, launched in January, Davis said that the BBC had become “concerned” that the podcast was “somehow treading on areas of public controversy”.
He added: “I take their shilling; they dictate the rules. They know they have to try and keep their presenters out of areas of public controversy and they have decided heat pumps can be controversial so they’ve asked me not to be involved.”
Heat pumps, powered by electricity, are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85 percent of Britain’s homes and account for 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide. The government has set a target of 600,000 heat pump installations every year by 2028, up from just 55,000 in 2022.
The Happy Heat Pump podcast co-hosted by Davis attempted to educate listeners about how to use a heat pump, how much they cost, and which properties are best suited to a heat pump.
Heat pumps can be more expensive to install than alternatives, though experts have blamed the government for not matching the incentives offered by its European counterparts. Heat pump uptake in the UK is among the lowest in Europe, with more than 500,000 heat pumps sold in France last year, and more than 400,000 in both Italy and Germany.
However, gas industry lobbyists and sections of the right-wing media have attempted to stoke a “culture war” around the uptake of heat pumps in the UK. DeSmog revealed in July 2023 that a barrage of negative press about heat pumps had been funded by a gas lobby group.
Davis’s podcast co-host, Bean Beanland, criticised the BBC’s decision. Beanland, the director for growth and external affairs for the Heat Pump Federation, said the corporation’s judgement was “extraordinary”.
“It does seem to me that somehow the technologies we espouse have fallen victim to some sort of culture war,” he added.
Davis said that he believes the BBC’s decision was “more about net zero than this particular form of heating”. The legally-binding target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 has also been weaponised by campaigners and conservative media outlets, despite a broad public consensus for reducing emissions and building new green infrastructure.
“Cars are controversial, they kill and maim thousands every year, but that hasn’t stopped the BBC glamorising car use in its decades broadcasting hundreds of episodes of Top Gear,” said Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute.
“Heat pumps, on the other hand, don’t kill or maim, they just cheaply and safely warm homes. It’s been estimated that swapping all 23 million gas boilers in the UK to heat pumps could save roughly £11 billion in wholesale gas costs.
“The technology is already hugely successful in some of the coldest countries in Europe. In those with the longest, harshest winters like Norway, Finland and Sweden, heat pumps dominate. Already by 2022 around 41 percent of Finnish households had a heat pump installed, with two-thirds in Norway and nearly half in Sweden. Try telling them that their heating systems are controversial.”
A number of commentators have expressed their dismay on social media at the BBC’s decision. Financial Times associate editor Stephen Bush accused the BBC of “muzzling one of its best presenters from making an excellent, wholly factual programme”. Bush added that the broadcaster was an “organisation badly in need of new leadership.”
A BBC spokesperson told DeSmog: “The BBC editorial guidelines are clear that anyone working for the BBC who does an external public speaking or writing engagement should not compromise the impartiality or integrity of the BBC or its content, or suggest that any part of the BBC endorses a third-party organisation, product, service or campaign.”
As previously revealed by DeSmog, the BBC’s commercial content arm, BBC StoryWorks, has been paid to promote oil and gas companies, agricultural giants, fossil fuel states, and high-emission transport firms.
Experts have also highlighted that Davis’s podcast was simply reflecting basic facts about heat pumps.
Energy policy expert Jan Rosenow said: “Heat pumps are a mature technology that has been around for more than 100 years. All authoritative analyses indicate that we need to deploy millions of them to reach net zero. Public controversy stems from poor reporting – Evan tried to change that.”
These sentiments were reflected by fellow climate expert Andrew Sissons, who said: “I’ve said this before but… heat pumps are really quite boring, and it says quite a lot about the state of debate in Britain that we’ve managed to make them controversial. Credit to Evan for trying to make them not controversial.”
It appears that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) – ultimately, in the final analysis a state broadcaster – is currently forbidden from mentioning Israel’s Gaza genocide. There are local elections approaching on 1st May after all …
I wonder if a DA-notice has been issued – the way to know is probably to watch other corporate media to see if there is a widespread censorship of the Israel Gaza genocide.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Hehe, I remember when the BBC was banned by the Labour government of the day from using the word “deep”. That was fun.
Activists hold a banner as they blockade the entrance
