On Feb. 28, the day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman interviewed former British ambassador to Tehran turned Chatham House fellow Richard Dalton.
However, the anti-American and antizionist talking points Dalton espoused largely went unchallenged by Newman.
Her failure to push back at Dalton’s agitprop is quite curious given that, in the past, she’s shown herself willing to go toe to toe with guests she found controversial, robustly challenging their views, such as during her viral debate in 2015 with Jordan Peterson.
Furthermore, Dalton’s wild accusations and pro-Iranian talking points shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the presenter if she or her producers had done any research on his radical views.
During a Channel 4 Dispatch “investigation” in 2009 on Britain’s “Israeli lobby”, produced by Peter Oborne, which was widely condemned by the Jewish community for promoting antisemitic tropes, Dalton accused the lobby of trying to “censor British politicians” from criticising Israel and alleged that the lobby “appears to be willing to use financial pressures as a way of enforcing [pro-Israel] decisions.”
More recently, he told Declassified UK during an interview after the last Israel-Iran war in June 2025 that “Israel is not an ally” of Britain, that the US and Israel together constituted “a greater threat to the stability of the region than Iran” and that the “lobby” is “a very powerful force in [British] society” including over politicians and political parties.
Dalton opened the Channel 4 News interview by alleging that “there is currently no evidence of an Iranian nuclear programme”, a claim contradicted by mounds of evidence, including reports by US negotiators that Iranian negotiators boasted that they had evaded international safeguards to enrich enough uranium so as “to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
Further, in late February, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that some of Iran’s most highly enriched uranium, close to weapons grade, was stored in an underground area of its nuclear site in Isfahan. It was the first time the IAEA has reported where uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the 90% weapons grade, has been stored.
Indeed, even uranium enriched to 60% purity has no peaceful applications.
Israel’s MFA published a document last year that reported, “parallel to its increased uranium enrichment activities, the Iranian regime also accelerated clandestine efforts towards developing all other technological components necessary to assemble a nuclear weapon”, including neutron initiators, “which trigger the chain reaction of a nuclear weapon”.
Dalton continued with his pro-Iranian talking points, calling the US attack on Iran a “massacre”, and even denied the indisputable fact regarding Iran’s genocidal designs against Israel, which, again, the Channel 4 News presenter failed to challenge.
Newman also didn’t respond to Dalton’s promotion of the antizionist-inspired genocide libel against Israel, or when he casually repeated Islamist messaging about the US being a “rogue” and “imperialist” state.
As William Atkinson wrote in the Spectator in January about Dalton and other figures in the UK who have been shilling for the Iranian regime, they should rightly be seen as “apologists for evil” and, therefore, “deserve to be named and shamed”.
Sadly for Channel 4 News viewers, Cathy Newman not only failed to cross-examine or shame Dalton like she tried to do with Jordan Peterson, but treated him with kid gloves, thereby legitimising the former ambassador’s diatribe about the West that was akin to what you’d expect to hear on Iran’s Press TV.
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