Andrew Gilligan writes about British Muslims more than anything else. Since June 2025, 35 of his 56 articles for The Spectator have been about Muslims, Muslim organisations or the Palestine movement, and not one of those 35 is neutral or sympathetic towards the people it is about.

He has been writing against Muslim groups he calls Islamist since 2009. He is now a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank and, as his Spectator byline says, a former No 10 adviser.

We read every article on his Spectator author page since June 2025, every Policy Exchange paper with his name on it since October 2024 and the 515 posts on his own copy of his Telegraph blog. What they show:

• 35 of 56. Five in every eight of his Spectator articles since June 2025 are about Muslims or the Palestine movement. All 35 are hostile.
• 12 of 14. Of the 14 Policy Exchange papers carrying his name since October 2024, 12 are about Muslims, Muslim organisations or Islamism. The other two are about transport. None is about any other faith or minority.
• 31 of 35. The NewsCord Watchdog found at least one problem in 31 of his 35 articles about Muslims or the Palestine movement. In 15 of them he smears a named person.
• 95 of 204. In 2010, his first full year at the Telegraph, nearly half the posts on his blog had a headline about Tower Hamlets, Muslims or Islamism.
• None. Across his 515 blog posts, his Policy Exchange papers and his Spectator articles since 2025, we found no piece about what Israel has done in Gaza.

Where he has worked

Gilligan made his name as a defence reporter at the BBC. He has worked in newspapers, at the BBC, on Iran's state television, at City Hall and in Downing Street:

Who he writes about

Since June 2025 his Spectator articles have attacked these Muslim organisations and people:

• Muslim organisations: the Muslim Council of Britain, the National Association of Muslim Police, the British Muslim Trust and MEND.
• Muslim public figures: Haringey's Labour leader Ibrahim Ali, the Labour Muslim Network's Ali Milani and Sayeeda Warsi.
• Farah Ahmed, a Cambridge academic, in five articles in August and September 2026.
• Muslim independents in politics: the councillors elected in May 2026, and the campaigns The Muslim Vote and Vote Palestine.

Links to Iran are one of his charges against Muslims:

• In January 2025, in a paper he wrote alone on the Muslim Council of Britain's new leaders, he wrote: "For his part, Adrees has strongly supported the dictatorial regime in Iran."
• In May 2026 a Policy Exchange report with Gilligan the first of three authors called the Islamic Human Rights Commission "a group which strongly supports the Iranian regime and has close links to the Iranian state". It held against a former acting mayor of Tower Hamlets that he had retweeted a clip of a show "which airs on Iran's Press TV".
• The next day, in The Spectator, he quoted Shakeel Afsar, co-leader of an independent group that won seats in Birmingham, "in a previously unreported interview with Iran's Press TV".
• On 9 October 2026 he called the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre in Glasgow "a mosque described as Scotland's unofficial base for the regime", citing a report in The Times, and added that its imam was filmed at Ayatollah Khamenei's funeral "weeping and paying respects before his coffin".

What the Watchdog found in his articles

We put all 35 of his articles about Muslims or the Palestine movement through the NewsCord Watchdog, which reads an article and flags only what it can show from the article's own words.

What it found:

• 31 of 35 articles carry at least one finding.
• 15 smear a named person.
• 7 use guilt by association.
• 7 carry a headline that says more than the article shows.
• 6 make a claim the article's own material contradicts.
• 3 use figures that mislead.
• 1 judge a whole people on a few.
• 2 vilify a community.

The worst of what it flagged, in his own words:

• Shakeel Afsar. He wrote that Afsar was "demanding that the British government arm Hamas". The words he then quoted were "I want us to fund the Palestinians" and "I want us to give them weapons". Hamas is not in them. The Watchdog scored the article 8 out of 10.
• Ibrahim Ali, Haringey's new Labour leader. He asked readers: "Could he still be working for Cage, or another Islamist organisation, in some capacity?" The Watchdog scored the article 8 out of 10.
• The Green party. His headline said "Polanski's party are the real racists". His first paragraph asked "what if parts of the Greens are the far right?" His evidence was "at least 17 Green candidates". The Watchdog scored it 7.3 out of 10.
• Sayeeda Warsi. His column put the heading "Refuses to distance herself from extremists" over a quote in which she says she will no longer be held responsible for other Muslims' views. The Watchdog read this column on its own, before any of the others, with no pointer from us.
• The British Muslim Trust. He wrote that the Trust "has decided it needs as many of those as possible, even if some have to be heavily massaged". The Watchdog found that nothing in his article shows any such decision, and that the sentence before it admits it is his guess: "I think we know what's happening here."
• Farah Ahmed, a Cambridge academic. His first article summed up her Cambridge work as a world where "celebrating Christmas is forbidden". The Christmas warnings he quotes come from a separate website, Salafi Homeschool, which, his own article says, the group she directs links to while saying it does not endorse it.
• The same academic, two weeks later. His headline put "to produce weaponry for Jihad" in quotation marks after "study engineering". The 2002 chapter she co-wrote ties engineering to "machinery for Jihad" and computer technology to "advanced weaponry for Jihad". The headline joins two sentences into one quotation.
• Sarah Helm, the national security adviser's wife. After listing her posts about Gaza, he asked readers: "What on earth must the pillow-talk in the Powell-Helm household be like?"

It is not only the articles about Muslims. In a piece on inclusivity training at Cambridge he wrote of "Muslim grooming scandals" in his own voice, which the Watchdog flags as vilifying a community.

How his writing on Muslims changed

Gilligan did not always write this way. In July 2005, two weeks after the London bombings, he wrote that "Iraq has radicalised a significant cadre of British Muslims". A month later he warned that if "mosques are to be closed, non-violent organisations and books to be suppressed, that can only reduce Muslims' willingness to inform."

By November 2009 he was blogging for the Telegraph and writing about Muslim groups he called Islamist. On 30 November he celebrated a libel win by Policy Exchange, the think tank he now works for, over a north London mosque as "a significant victory against Islamists' use of the libel laws". In The Spectator's issue of 5 December, he wrote about Farah Ahmed, a Muslim head teacher, over a chapter she had written for a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet:

That month he also wrote three blog posts about Hizb ut Tahrir, which he called "the Islamic equivalent of the BNP".

He is still writing about the same woman. His five Spectator articles about her in August and September 2026 went back to the same pamphlet. The first told readers: "Ahmed first came to public attention in 2009, when I exposed the fact that she was running two private primary schools".

On 1 March 2010 Channel 4 broadcast his Dispatches film on the Islamic Forum of Europe and the East London Mosque. That week he started a series on his blog called "Islamist Blogpost of the Day".

In June 2010 he called Prevent "clumsy" and "inevitably tainted by their government sponsorship", and wrote: "There should be no more mass stop-and-search programmes in Muslim areas". In the same piece he set a rule for anyone he calls an Islamist: "no public money, no official contact, no posts in policymaking bodies".

Six years later his Sunday Telegraph story on Prevent's critics ran under the headline "Muslim extremists' 'campaign of lies' to undermine government's anti-terror Prevent policy".

By 2026 his Policy Exchange papers had a new name for Muslim independents who campaigned on Palestine: "Islamopopulists".

The woman the Telegraph apologised to

That 2016 story named Ifhat Smith, a Hackney mother who had spoken publicly, including to Sky News, about her son being questioned at school under Prevent after he used the word "eco-terrorist" in a French lesson. That October the Sunday Telegraph apologised to her and paid her compensation:

In April 2026 Gilligan wrote about her again in The Spectator, under the line "The Green party's embrace of extremists is gathering pace." His case this time rested on her posts about Zionists and the 7 October attack. He identified her through the same Prevent story and the same Sky News interview. He did not mention the apology.

What Palestine is in his writing

Palestine appears in Gilligan's work almost only as a charge against someone:

• 12 of 14. Of his 14 Spectator articles on the Green party since April 2026, 12 are about candidates' posts on Zionism, Israel or antisemitism.
• Three articles in five days in October 2026 on Sarah Helm, the wife of the national security adviser, over her posts about Gaza and Hamas.
• A Gaza ceasefire speech used as evidence against the new leader of the Muslim Council of Britain in his January 2025 paper: "We refuse to accept building our lives, our communities, our future here in this country on the dead bodies of our brothers and sisters overseas".
• "Only 25%". A May 2026 Policy Exchange report he co-wrote said "only 25% of British Muslims put Gaza in their top three issues", and that Gaza is "best understood not as an accurate reflection of Muslim voters' priorities, but as an "organising idea"". The first report in the same series found that 25% of British Muslim respondents picked Israel-Gaza, more than picked the economy (21%), housing (20%) or healthcare (19%).
• Palestinians become Hamas. In May 2026 he turned a Birmingham politician's call to arm "the Palestinians" into a demand to "arm Hamas".
• "And they don't like Jews much." When Tower Hamlets council voted for sanctions on Israel in 2011, he called it "Islamist ideology" and wrote that line about the councillors' backers.

The one sympathetic line we found, "It is a noble cause. The Palestinians are an oppressed people", sits in a 2011 post about a Palestinian leader in which he also wrote that lying is "of course one of their principal techniques", meaning Islamists.

We found no piece by him about what Israel has done in Gaza.

Every article we counted

Here is the full split of his 56 Spectator articles. Where it was arguable whether an article was about Muslims or the Palestine movement, we counted it as not. Counting those 5 would make it 40 of 56.

The rest of his record

Corrections, apologies and settlements involving Muslim people and organisations are part of Gilligan's record, and we have set out every one of them, case by case, in Andrew Gilligan's record.

Andrew Gilligan has been writing against Muslim groups he calls Islamist since 2009. Since June 2025 he has written 35 Spectator articles about Muslims or the Palestine movement, every one of them hostile, and the Watchdog found a problem in 31.