Today we launch a new series, Inside Britain's Conspiracy Machine, a deep dive into the outlets, platforms and politicians turning conspiracy theories into political currency.
You may have noticed that something has changed about how misinformation moves in Britain.
A claim surfaces on X, often anonymous, often algorithmically boosted. Within hours it’s being treated as a legitimate “debate” on Talk Radio or GB News. Within days it’s taking up column inches in the national press, no longer presented as speculation but as an already established position, or someone reputable giving it airtime. By the time it reaches Facebook, it’s simply “news”, several steps removed from a source nobody ever checked, and impossible to trace back.
Misinformation is no longer just fringe claims circulating on the margins, but a well-functioning pipeline.
We’re calling this a series about an ecosystem, deliberately. It’s tempting to treat each flashpoint, such as a misidentified suspect, a false claim about a security watchlist, a politician “just asking questions” about a live police investigation, as an isolated actor, getting it wrong this time.
But that would be a mischaracterisation. This happens often, and with increasing frequency, the visible output of a system in which outlets, platforms and individuals launder claims through each other, until the origin is untraceable and the claim itself becomes as much a part of the story as the truth.
The reason The Lead is covering this now is straightforward: the stakes have risen. We’ve watched this mechanism attach itself to a missing person’s case, to an abhorrent senseless act of violence including children, and, at time of writing, to an active murder investigation. This all has real consequences for the people involved, for the police trying to run those investigations, and for public trust more broadly.
Politicians — like Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe — who would once have kept their distance from fringe conspiracy theories now amplify them from the front pages of national newspapers without cost. Regulators exist on paper to catch some of this, but there’s a widening gap between what people assume those regulators can do and what the rules actually allow them to do.
This week, Andy Burnham used his UN speech to announce a National Centre for Information Defence — an unprecedented piece of state machinery aimed at this problem, built to detect and disrupt foreign disinformation campaigns. It’s scoped to hostile state actors, rather than the wider ecosystem of domestic amplification, and its early priority looks to be Russian bot networks rather than the pipeline we’re describing here. Whether it goes far enough is an open question and one we’ll be exploring over the coming months.
But the response to it was fascinating. The government said clearly the unit would not touch domestic political dissent. Farage responded within hours by calling it an “Orwellian” attack on free speech anyway (a claim made and boosted using exactly this pattern: assertion, little no evidence, let the outrage cycle do the rest). A unit built to counter disinformation had disinformation deployed against it before it had even seen the light of day. This is what we’re up against.
Over the coming months, we’ll be dedicating time to this ecosystem from several angles, exploring how claims move and gain legitimacy as they pass between platforms and outlets; what’s actually happening in specific, live cases where this pattern has played out; what regulators can and can’t do about it, and why; and what — if anything — might meaningfully change the incentives for the people and organisations profiting from it.
We’ll be talking to psychologists, lawyers, regulators and the people directly affected by these stories, and we’ll be asking some uncomfortable questions about who this ecosystem actually serves and what can be done about it. And our The Lead Untangles series continues too, which each week drills into a topic making the headlines or going under the radar that needs examining.
We think this is one of the most consequential, under-scrutinised stories in British politics right now. Not because any individual claim within it is new, but because the machine amplifying those claims has become so efficient.
Over the next week, we hope to make that machine visible.
We start this weekend with Katherine Denkinson's (who you may remember from her superb investigation into the Common Law Court conspiracy) deep dive into how one story — the death of Ann Widdecombe, and the conspiracy theories that followed — reveals the machine at work, claim by claim. Out Saturday. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it first and direct.
Quick one to flag outside our usual output… over the past few days I’ve been part of The Wargame series airing on Sky One and Now TV, simulating a Russian attack on the UK.
It’s a sobering, eye-opening look at just how exposed our defence capabilities really are, and tonight’s the last of four gripping instalments. I’ve been playing the Head of Press for the government throughout, thrown into the simulated crisis and having to draft the line to take while, organise press conferences and addresses to the nation, and keeping journalists fed while everything’s unfolding in real time.
It was genuinely compelling to be part of, and honestly a bit frightening.
What it lays bare about our current state of readiness is not comfortable viewing — years of underinvestment and hollowed out capacity, austerity, and a reliance on the goodwill of our allies don't stay abstract for long, especially with a US president that is itching to teach Europe a lesson.
Tonight brings the series to a close on Sky. And don’t switch off afterwards, because there’s a live show at 10pm, where the cast will react to how it all played out.
Well worth tuning in for if you get the chance. And of course — let me know what you’d have done differently in any of our shoes.
Our Burnham Britain’s series continues too in the coming weeks, as we head to Labour Party Conference to hear from the PM in his first conference speech. Over the coming weeks we’ll be examining homelessness, social care and the prison crisis in depth to see the policy choices this government chooses to make.