The truth is out there: Eamonn Holmes and his wife and co-presenter, Ruth Langsford. (Photo by Karwai Tang/Getty Images For Red Bull Air Race)

Dear Eamonn,
We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.
I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.
Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”
I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.
The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.
So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.
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