Haven’t tried to work in UK, but have done so in a couple of Caribbean nations, and they do indeed get all pissy if work visa paperwork isn’t fully in order. Mine always has been, luckily.
Wonder why he didn’t enter on a tourist visa and then take the job under the table, like so many people do here.
One of the articles says that they kept asking him if he wanted to change his answers to some of the questions, so it almost sounds like they would have let him in if he'd just said "tourist." You can fly to Britain without a visa as a tourist, but you can't fly there and say that you're taking a job without having the paperwork in order. And that, I suspect, is why this story died rather quickly last summer.