Editorial
Wearing bacon lapels

This is what Sky News does. Occasionally, the network will apologise. Occasionally, there will be recognition that standards were breached, that there was an apparent failure of process. It doesn’t make it any less deliberate. It happens too often for it to be anything but.

Last Sunday, the network put to air an interview with Islamophobic activist Ryan Williams. When he arrived at the studio, he was wearing bacon lapels. Other times he wears them more as epaulets. As a technician fitted a microphone around the smallgoods, he said: “Strangely, not the weirdest thing I’ve done in this job.”

Williams doesn’t do anything other than this. He has as many notes as a bicycle horn. You cannot book him for a show and then be surprised by what he says. You get him on for the hatred and the social media following, which is what now passes for discourse on the right.

As the interview started, Williams said he was wearing bacon because “the terrorists” are threatening “to behead me every single day”. He grinned. He claimed the United Kingdom was at risk of “Islam invasion”.

He noted that the mayor of London was Muslim and wrongly claimed Birmingham was “majority Muslim”.

From there he launched into a string of hackneyed lines: that Muhammad was a paedophile and a warlord, that he married a child, that he was like a porn star and slept with a string of men. Earlier, before he went on air, he likened his own penis to a chipmunk’s and said he had “enough balls” to fight Islam.

“These remarks were wholly inappropriate and unacceptable and have no place on our network. The guest responsible should never have appeared,” a Sky News spokesperson said afterwards.

“He was specifically asked for his reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination and its fallout but instead used our platform to spread his harmful views.

“We recognise the harm such rhetoric can cause and take full responsibility for this failure in our editorial processes.”

The show is hosted by Freya Leach, who is 22. In the broom closet approach of Sky News, there were no senior editors available to vet the guest and Leach depended on a producer for support. This is also no accident: oversight is only necessary if you intend to maintain standards.

Leach is a significant figure on the young right. She is the director of the Centre for Youth Policy at the Menzies Research Centre and a failed Liberal candidate for the seat of Balmain. Her husband is Cooper Gannon, president of the New South Wales Young Liberals. In August, she shared a picture of them together in fancy dress. “Big weekend: Cooper became Young Liberal President and my show launched on Sky. We are so blessed.”

Williams’ greasy-shouldered burlesque comes as the Coalition is again exploiting anxieties over immigration. Andrew Hastie says the intake should be cut. He worries about falling birthrates, an old racist panic. Alongside historic pictures of a white family and a man in shorts and long socks, he writes: “We’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home.”

Sky News will now prerecord Freya Fires Up. The regulator will likely find it breached broadcast standards, as it has numerous times before, on climate change and Covid-19 misinformation and myriad other reactionary shibboleths. It doesn’t matter. It has already done what it intended to do: open the Overton window a little further and let another porcine hatred scamper through it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Wearing bacon lapels".

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