It was the height of summer 2020, and Andrew Barnes, home from university, was settling back into life in Guernsey, a British dependency that at the time had no COVID-19 cases. The pubs were busy, offshore finance workers tinkered with their spreadsheets, and a delayed election – which one pundit branded “the strangest in the world” – was back on. As the manifestos started trickling in, Barnes, not usually too bothered by politics, took interest. “A lot of the candidates were spouting information which had no factual basis whatsoever,” he told me. Nothing new, perhaps. But Barnes thought something needed to be done, so he created an independent fact-checking site modelled on the UK-based FullFact.
Working mostly alone and for free, this student would try to hold back a wave of misinformation washing over the British island.
Like Barnes, I had returned home to Guernsey for the pandemic-struck summer after becoming interested in this strange election. When we first met, I expected to find myself on the sidelines of some quirky politics. I didn’t expect to be leaked a report about a secretive multi-million-pound government-backed fund. I didn’t expect senior figures in the island’s financial and political world to whisper their concerns about this fund to me if I promised not to reveal their names. I didn’t expect to find a tangle of conflicts of interest and questionable double-jobbing. In fact, much of our initial conversation was about squirrels.
