Steven Bartlett: the glorified PR man quietly making Britain worse

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.

• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country
• Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars
• The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM
• The ‘Red Tory’ behind one of the most anti-feminist ideas in British politics
• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions
• Modern British dating is a car-crash – and Cilla Black is to blame
• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury
• The shadowy maverick who pulled Labour’s strings… and sunk Starmer

From the moment guests are booked onto Steven Bartlett’s behemoth podcast, The Diary of a CEO, an operation of psychological disarmament begins.

They will be offered a night in a five-star hotel and driven to Bartlett’s studio in a luxury car in the morning. Upon arrival, their favourite music will be playing from the speakers – perhaps even songs from their first ever concert, meticulously researched by producers – while the air is carefully measured for the optimum CO2 levels for cognitive function, and the room perfumed with their favourite scent. When their interview is finished, they will be handed a black-bound photobook containing glossy photos from the just-recorded episode, accompanied by their most poignant quotes, handwritten, alongside relevant time stamps.

When Jimmy Fallon hosted Bartlett on The Tonight Show following his Diary of a CEO appearance last year, he told the audience his photobook moved him to tears. While a celebrity crying over their own quotes is rather nauseating, it tracks with the tone of a show built around sycophancy.

Since the 33-year-old entrepreneur and youngest Dragon’s Den investor Steven Bartlett launched The Diary of a CEO in 2017, first hosting business leaders before pivoting to high-profile names including Simon Cowell, Molly-Mae Hague, Rita Ora and Jimmy Carr, it has become a slick podium from which often misunderstood public figures can prune their reputations through a flattering two-hour interview that reveals their childhood traumas and carefully chosen moments of resilience.

The Diary of a CEO’s red carpet treatment usually results in them letting their guard down enough for the money shot: a clip of them wiping away tears, too moved to speak, which producers can then set to dramatic music in the trailer and hope it goes viral. It also assures them of Bartlett’s loyalty: no compromising questions will be asked. Bartlett, with his enormous budgets and serious tone, may give The Diary of a CEO the gravitas of a BBC Panorama documentary, yet in reality, for most guests, it’s a glorified PR campaign.

As Bartlett’s media empire has grown, traditional media has declined. Magazines and newspapers, once powerful enough to make or break a name, were first usurped by the direct-to-consumer model of social media: young stars could speak to their fans on their own terms. Unless they wanted a luxury fashion shoot, no third party was needed. More established stars, scarred from the tabloids’ vicious and prurient heyday, sensed the wind change and followed suit. Then podcasting exploded, and celebrities realised they could speak without being editorialised, often to fellow famous faces whose lofty dreams of their own TV chat show could now be sated with a podcast they could launch from home.

Legacy media, then, got frozen out, and in the decade I’ve been a writer and editor, first at Condé Nast and then at The Daily Telegraph, I’ve seen a new media hierarchy emerge, with individual creators replacing heritage titles. In Britain, it’s Bartlett at the top – a man whose ambition is to build “the Disney of the creator economy”, and whose umbrella company Steven.com was last year valued at £315m.

With 50 million monthly downloads and 17 million YouTube subscribers, The Diary of a CEO far outstrips the circulation figures of most newspapers, and celebrities flock to his studio knowing they will leave feeling “understood”. Fine if you’re actress Maisie Williams, who spoke movingly to Bartlett about how her life fell apart after starring in Game of Thrones, less fine if you’re Ivanka Trump, who in April spent much of her episode waxing lyrical about working for her father Donald Trump in the White House, in what felt like a cod therapy session fine-tuned to humanise her – and by extension the US President.

At no point did Bartlett challenge her on the claims that her $800m (£606m) fashion brand was supplied by factory workers earning just $1 (76p) an hour or her father’s most controversial policies. Instead, he described her as an “empath” and lambasted the way the press “tried to drive a wedge between you and your father”. In the YouTube comments, someone wrote: “This is what PR looks like in 2026.”

It was a similar story with music mogul Scooter Braun, who came on the show for image rehabilitation after a highly publicised feud with Taylor Swift, who accused him of “incessant, manipulative bullying” (claims Braun denied) after he acquired the masters of her first six albums and sold them to a private equity firm. By bypassing the rigour of traditional media, powerful figures such as Braun or Trump can avoid accountability entirely, while spreading their own unchallenged narrative to millions.

It seems obvious why Bartlett wants to ingratiate himself with the one per cent. Not only does it suit his ambitions as a serial entrepreneur, it serves podcasting’s main growth strategy: you guest on my podcast, I’ll guest on yours. Bartlett has appeared on both Mel Robbins and Michelle Obama’s podcasts after they came on his, creating a closed circuit of the famous interviewing the famous with no tough questions asked. The loop is also lucrative: through his London-based company Flight Story, Bartlett manages and produces other podcasts, including Davina McCall’s Begin Again and Paul Brunson’s We Need to Talk.

With five million followers on Instagram, Bartlett has now become famous himself, making him even more of a sympathetic ear to celebrities who increasingly prefer to eschew the working journalist in favour of “one of their own”. Glossy magazines now allow Hollywood actors to be interviewed by their fawning directors or co-stars, with the toe-curlingly earnest “actors on actors” format spawning countless parody skits on social media. When asking Ivanka Trump about her relationship with the media, Bartlett told her he understood how it felt, miming being fired at from a line of imaginary shooters. He was no doubt alluding to his slew of recent controversies. In 2023, he was accused of embellishing part of his origin story. The year before he fell foul of advertising regulation. And in 2024, he was accused of spreading serious health misinformation – the BBC World Service found each of his episodes featuring a “health expert” contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against scientific evidence.

More recently, Bartlett has been accused of perpetuating misogynistic arguments through conversations with various male guests about whether “systems” should be put in place to help men find partners to fix falling birth rates – and suggestions that female autonomy had become a societal problem. Softly spoken and intelligent, Bartlett, who had positioned himself as Britain’s more thoughtful answer to controversial US “brocaster” Joe Rogan, is particularly adept at trojan-horsing manosphere ideology into his content, which makes it all the more concerning.

According to The Children’s Society, 63 per cent of young men actively watch “masculinity influencers”, while a study from King’s College showed 57 per cent are sceptical of feminism. Misogynistic hate speech is on the rise in British schools – earlier this year, female teachers described the abuse they receive from boys as a “masculinity crisis” – while Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley blamed online “masculinity content” for the rise in teen-on-teen sex offences. Young British men may listen to Bartlett’s episodes, marketed around helping you live better, think better, work better, thinking he’s one of the good guys.

Yet, by allowing divisive theories about how men are victims of feminism to regularly thread through his content unchallenged, he is complicit in their radicalisation. If Bartlett keeps following the Rogan blueprint, it’s likely he will soon be strategising about The Diary of a CEO’s political influence – Rogan, among many manosphere podcasters, was a key pitstop on Trump’s election campaign. Just last week, he interviewed US Vice President JD Vance. Young British men are shifting further and further to the Right, and Bartlett seems happy to meet them there.

For his part, Bartlett clarified the “systems” remark after the podcast and said he was talking about mental health support networks for men. A spokesperson for his podcast has also pushed back against claims it is increasingly right-wing, saying it “features guests from across the entire political and cultural spectrum”, and says Bartlett does not adopt their opinions.

Bartlett, who last year made Time100’s list of most influential people, can no longer just be celebrated as a leading example of British entrepreneurship: the underdog who dropped out of school at age 16 and made his millions. His new media empire has undermined Britain’s journalistic principles of integrity and accountability and become a hall of mirrors for the rich and famous. For the young British men who look up to him, he is not the role model they think he is.