Guido Fawkes

Background

Guido Fawkes is a libertarian political news blog founded by Paul Staines in 2004. Both its name and logo are inspired by Guy Fawkes, who it describes as “the only man to enter parliament with honest intentions”. Its staff “see themselves as campaigning journalists” against “sleaze, corruption and hypocrisy”.¹

Guido, as it is often called, has a section dedicated to environmental issues called Gaia Fawkes which regularly criticises the green movement,² including climate protest group Extinction Rebellion and 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.³ It also regularly promotes.⁴ reports by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate science denial organisation⁵

The website is owned and published by Global and General Nominees,⁶ a company based in the Caribbean tax haven Nevis. In 2009, Staines told the Guardian that the site’s URL was German while the blog is hosted in the USA, so “it’s a jurisdictional nightmare” for anyone to take legal action. ⁷

In the same article, Conservative blogger Iain Dale claimed that “half of parliament looks at his [Staines’] blog most days… he has the largest audience of any UK blog on politics”.⁸

A number of Guido employees have gone on to work in the Conservative Party and have ties to groups that campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, including Vote Leave. Staines was also an early backer of Boris Johnson to be the prime minister of the United Kingdom having registered a website in 2012 called Boris2020.⁹

The blog has ties to 55 Tufton Street – home to a network of right-wing lobby groups – through Staines’ relations with TaxPayers’ Alliance founder and former Vote Leave CEO Matthew Elliott.¹⁰

Guido’s factual accuracy was rated as being “mixed” with a right-leaning bias by the website Media Bias Fact Check.¹¹

Stance on Climate Change

October 13, 2019

On Twitter, Guido wrote:

“We don’t dispute that climate changes, we dispute that we are on the verge of a climate catastrophy [sic].”¹²

Funding

Guido is funded through advertisements on its website, though it is unclear whether the blog receives financial support from any additional sources.

In 2006, Staines co-founded MessageSpace, ¹³ with broadcaster Iain Dale and other political bloggers,¹⁴ a digital advertising company that hosts viral marketing campaigns and sells adverts across a range of political blogs. In 2011, the Guardian reported that Guido and MessageSpace turnover is believed to be about £150,000 a year.¹⁵

Companies that have been advertised by MessageSpace include Gatwick Airport, Microsoft and Coca Cola, as well as campaign groups such as Shelter and Cancer Research UK. The site also lists six websites including Guido Fawkes, ConservativeHome and LabourList under the heading “Trusted by advertisers and readers alike”.¹⁶

Guido also regularly promotes reports and events on behalf of the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), including through its daily newsletter.¹⁷

Key People

Current

Paul Staines is the founder and editor-in-chief of Guido.¹⁸ While at college, Staines was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students,¹⁹ writing that the group “spoke a language I could understand – Thatcher on drugs … anti-Communist, anti-Wet and mainly reactionary”. After helping to organise illegal raves and working as a hedge fund manager, Staines set up the political blog in his late thirties to “make mischief at the expense of politicians”. He is a “committed Brexiteer,” according to former Guardian correspondent Anne Perkins, and his politics are “right wing, free market”.²⁰

Christian Calgie has been a reporter at Guido since 2019.²¹ He graduated with a degree in British Politics and Legislative Studies from the University of Hull in 2019 where he was editor of The Tab Hull student news site and worked as a parliamentary aide for Conservative MP and current Minister for International Trade Ranil Jayawardena.²² Before joining Guido, Calgie worked on the Rory For Leader campaign to elect Rory Stewart as Leader of the Conservative Party.²³

Former

Tom Harwood, who joined Guido in 2018, was the website’s senior reporter before leaving to join right-wing news channel GB News as its political correspondent. He has written for ConservativeHome,²⁴ the Spectator, and the Telegraph, among others. While studying politics at Durham University, Harwood was chairman of the national student arm of the official Vote Leave campaign in 2015-16,²⁵ worked as a parliamentary assistant in the House of Commons during a summer 2016 internship, and was an intern at Students for Liberty in 2017 in Washington D.C. The group is funded by Charles Koch of Koch Industries, a major fossil fuel company in the United States. In 2019 LBC listed Harwood as one of the 100 most influential Conservatives in the UK. ²⁶ ²⁷

Hugh Bennett was a news editor at Guido.²⁸ Before joining the blog in 2018, Bennett was a correspondence officer at the Vote Leave campaign from 2015 to August 2016 after which he became deputy editor at BrexitCentral, a pro-Brexit news site co-founded by former CEO of Vote Leave Matthew Elliott. He left Guido in 2019 to work as a special advisor for the Conservative Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg²⁹ to help “get Brexit through the commons”, according to a post on the Guido website.³⁰ In February 2020, Bennett moved to work at Number 10’s EU negotiating unit.³¹

Harry Cole was the Westminster bureau chief and second in command at Guido before moving to work at the Sun as Westminster correspondent in 2015, and then deputy political editor of the Mail on Sunday in 2018.³² He is currently the Sun’s political editor.³³

Ross Kempsell was former chief reporter at Guido and now a special correspondent at Times Radio.³⁴ He also worked as a special advisor at Number 10 under Prime Minister Boris to focus on reform of Whitehall and the public sector.³⁵

Alex Wickham was a news editor at Guido before joining Buzzfeed UK in 2018 as a senior political correspondent.³⁶ In June 2020, Politico revealed that Wickham would be taking over as editor of the site’s London Playbook political newsletter.³⁷

Jim Waterson was an intern at Guido Fawkes.³⁸ He has since been BuzzFeed’s political editor and is now the media editor at the Guardian.³⁹

Actions

May 18, 2021

An article in Guido Fawkes disputed that working-class Britons were concerned about the impact of climate change, citing a poll from market research company Ipsos MORI which stated: “Those living in the south of England and Scotland are more likely to mention these issues than those in the Midlands and north of England.”⁴⁰

The article also argued that: “the little rising concern that there is about the environment and climate change is being driven by specific demographic subgroups within the wider population,” later concluding: “Red Wall voters are primarily concerned about the pandemic, the economy, Brexit, and the NHS ahead of green issues. It is a small minority of mostly better-off Southern voters who will vote to put up their electricity bills and force people to buy expensive electric cars.”

September 8, 2020

Guido stated that the public “are not buying Extinction Rebellion’s nonsense a second time around”, characterising them as “eco-terrorists”.⁴¹

July 7, 2020

An article in Guido criticised the government’s decision to reject Banks Mining’s planning application to mine coal at a temporary surface site at Highthorn, Northumberland, stating: “Obviously listening to voters risks upsetting climate activists who live in a pretend world where hydrogen technology is ready to replace coal in commercial steel production.” The article continued: “The MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) is torn between Northern miners desperate for jobs and apocalyptic activists on Twitter.”⁴²

The article’s content was sponsored and produced by fuel industry advisor Ian Gregory of the pro-fracking PR firm Abzed, whose clients include oil and gas exploration company Cuadrilla Resources.⁴³ Gregory has criticised banning home coal fires in an article for The Express, writing: “Boris Johnson’s green policies make Leonardo DiCaprio seem virtuous.”⁴⁴

June 18, 2020

Guido covered a report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) which claimed there would be blackouts due to increasing struggles to balance the electricity grid due to the intermittency of wind and solar power.⁴⁵

May 5, 2020

Guido tweeted:

“Lots of #coronavirus talk about how science is a deliberative process, a hypothesis is tested, conjectures and refutations, many iterations before arriving at a working theory. Apart from non-falsifiable climate change theories – they are immutable and to say otherwise is heresy.”⁴⁶

March 25, 2020

During the coronavirus pandemic, Guido claimed environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) was “in favour of extinction” after a Twitter account,⁴⁷ claiming to be the East Midlands branch of the group, posted images of stickers which read: “Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease!” Guido wrote:⁴⁸

“The trouble with having a terrorist-like cell structure is that when one group makes a PR faux par it’s hard to disavow them…

“This is what Extinction Rebellion’s leaders believe, the East Midlands group is just following the logic of their messaging, which often pushes the discredited idea that there are somehow ‘too many people’ to sustain. A perfect world for Extinction Rebellion types would be one with no travel, no industry, no jobs, and no humans at all…”⁴⁹

Extinction Rebellion were, however, quick to condemn what it called a “fake Twitter account”⁵⁰ and an East Midlands group does not appear on XR’s current branch list. British fact checking charity Full Fact were also quick to explain the claims saying, “anyone can use Extinction Rebellion fonts and logos to make materials resembling the groups signature messaging”.⁵¹

February 24, 2020

Guido published an article referring to a new report from the GWPF which claimed that it would cost the UK over £3 trillion to reach “net zero” emissions by 2050.⁵²

Both the Guido and Gaia Fawkes Twitter accounts shared⁵³ a link to the article with the words, “net zero emissions to cost over £100,000 per household”.⁵⁴

The article wrote:⁵⁵

“Guido would have thought the Government would take more care over this enormously expensive decarbonising project that is pushing ahead with next to no scrutiny…”⁵⁶

Policy analysts at climate science website Carbon Brief strongly disputed the GWPF’s claims.⁵⁷

September 20, 2019

Guido shared a school strike climate quiz from its “friends” at the GWPF. The interactive quiz was made up of 12 questions that emphasised positive changes that have happened since the start of the industrial revolution in regards to poverty, extreme weather events, and temperature change.⁵⁸

May 21, 2019

Guido tweeted:⁵⁹

“The only zero emission economy is a pre-industrial economy. No steel, no concrete, no planes and no fertiliser. The latter means half the planet will starve. So we need to solve global warming through technology. Everything else is fantasy.”⁶⁰

August 27, 2016

Guido tweeted: “His brother is a climate realist. I like Piers”, in apparent reference to the brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Piers Corbyn has repeatedly claimed carbon dioxide has no effect on global temperature change and that climate science is “fake”.⁶¹

February 2015

Guido launched an environmental section to its site, calling it Gaia Fawkes. Staines said:⁶² ⁶³

“It’ll cover energy and other issues, plus the Green party, which I think will be a big thing in the next few months… We want energy companies to be able to place their corporate responsibility advertising with us without fear. They know we have got that Westminster audience.”⁶⁴

55 Tufton Street – Paul Staines, along with TaxPayers’ Alliance founder Matthew Elliott, digital strategist Jag Singh, and digital specialist Andrew Whitehurst, set up political data company WESS Digital in 2012.⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ The TaxPayers’ Alliance is based at 55 Tufton Street. Tom Harwood and Hugh Bennett worked on the Vote Leave campaign, also previously based at the address.⁶⁷