BBC Newsnight introduced Zoe Gardner as a “migration and asylum researcher” to discuss the High Court ruling that the Bell Hotel in Epping cannot house migrants. Gardner is a long-standing lefty pro-asylum activist, not some neutral boffin. Unsurprisingly, she told the programme:
“It’s absolutely the wrong way for this to have gone. And the result, which is that people are being moved out of a hotel where there were violent racist protests taking place week in week out. But for it to happen in this way, what an enormous humiliation for the government, a huge failure. And what they’ve done is fuelled the flames of this hate lit.”
What Newsnight failed to mention is Gardner’s lengthy activist CV. Gardner has consistently branded demonstrations against asylum hotels as a “well-organised movement” driven by “racism and disinformation” that’s been “validated by the press and politicians.” Some of her more eyebrow-raising tweets include:
Robert Jenrick attending this last weekend’s racist protest was a red line, and it is absolutely correct that the hotel be shut down. It was clearly unsafe for asylum seekers to continue to be housed there.
Frankly it was only a matter of time until someone was lynched.
— Zoe Gardner (@ZoeJardiniere) August 19, 2025
Yvette Cooper on #r4today echoing Trump’s racist characterisation of asylum seekers as criminals & specifically rapists.
We are on such a dangerous path towards the same deranged, fascistic nightmare as they are seeing in the US – all justified by hatred of migrants & refugees.
— Zoe Gardner (@ZoeJardiniere) April 29, 2025
She has long campaigned for open borders and also organised protests when JD Vance visited the Cotswolds earlier this month.Guido doubts the BBC would call a guest campaigning against asylum hotels a mere “researcher”. They’d be introduced as an “activist” quick enough…
Statement by Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers Limited, following Harry’s loss in court today:
“Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin. Poor Harry. I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case. The bitter irony is that his mother, Diana, liked the Mail. We were her paper. We took her side in her acrimonious break up with Charles. She and I would speak and meet. The Mail’s superb royal reporter was her friend and confidante. The truth is that this trumped-up action – which has cost well over £50 million and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time – should never have been brought to trial. That it did, raises profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession. Today’s verdict is not just a victory for Associated’s magnificent journalists – several of whom have had a terrible toll imposed on their health and lives – but a free press generally. Make no mistake. This was a conspiracy, supported by Hacked Off, to destroy a paper. Financed by the orgy-loving, racist Max Mosley and involving the actor Hugh Grant, it was also a sinister bid to resuscitate Leveson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press which, even now, is rearing its ugly head in Labour’s Media Green Paper.”