Andrew Ferguson Neil was born on 21 May 1949 and is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster who is chairman of The Spectator and presenter of The Andrew Neil Show on Channel 4.
61 Facts About Andrew Neil
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Andrew Neil was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994.
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Andrew Neil has presented BBC political programmes and was chairman of GB News.
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Andrew Neil entered journalism in 1973 as a correspondent for The Economist.
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Andrew Neil was appointed editor of The Sunday Times by Rupert Murdoch in 1983, and held this position until 1994.
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Andrew Neil was chief executive and editor-in-chief of Press Holdings Media Group.
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Andrew Neil worked for the BBC for 25 years until 2020, fronting various programmes, including Sunday Politics and This Week on BBC One and Daily Politics, Politics Live and The Andrew Neil Show on BBC Two.
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Andrew Neil later joined Channel 4 in 2022 as presenter of The Andrew Neil Show, which shares the same name as his former BBC Two programme.
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Andrew Neil was born on 21 May 1949 in Paisley, Renfrewshire, to Mary and James Andrew Neil.
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Andrew Neil's mother worked in cotton mills during World War II and his father ran the wartime Cairo fire brigade, worked as an electrician and was a major in the Territorial Army in Renfrewshire.
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Andrew Neil grew up in the Glenburn area and attended the local Lancraigs Primary School.
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Andrew Neil was a member of the Dialectic Society and the Conservative Club, and participated in Glasgow University Union inter-varsity debates.
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Andrew Neil graduated in 1971, with an MA with honours in political economy and political science.
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Andrew Neil had been tutored by Vince Cable and had a focus on American history.
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Andrew Neil was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994.
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Andrew Neil's hiring was controversial: it was argued he was appointed by Rupert Murdoch over more experienced colleagues, such as Hugo Young and Brian MacArthur.
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Andrew Neil told Murdoch before he was appointed editor that The Sunday Times was intellectually stuck in a 1960s time warp and that it needed to "shake off its collectivist mind-set to become the champion of a market-led revolution that would shake the British Establishment to its bones and transform the economy and society".
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Andrew Neil wrote editorials supporting the United States invasion of Grenada because it would restore democracy there, despite opposition from Hugo Young.
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Andrew Neil replied to Young that he wanted the editorial stance of The Sunday Times to be "neo-Keynesian in economic policy, radical right in industrial policy, liberal on social matters and European and Atlanticist on foreign policy".
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When Buckingham Palace issued a statement rebutting the story, Andrew Neil was so angry at what he considered to be the Palace's double-dealing that he refused to print the statement in later editions of The Sunday Times.
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Worsthorne argued in an editorial article "Playboys as Editors" in March 1989 for The Sunday Telegraph that Andrew Neil was not fit to edit a serious Sunday newspaper.
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Worsthorne effectively accused Andrew Neil of knowing that Bordes was a prostitute.
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Andrew Neil apparently did not know about Bordes, which the Telegraph had accepted by the time the libel case came to High Court of Justice in January 1990, but the paper still defended their coverage as fair comment.
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Andrew Neil blamed Thatcher for high inflation, "misplaced chauvinism" over Europe, and the poll tax, concluding that she had become an "electoral liability" and must therefore be replaced by Heseltine.
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In 1992 Andrew Neil was criticised by anti-Nazi groups and historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper for employing the Holocaust denier David Irving to translate the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.
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Many years later, in November 2017, former Conservative cabinet minister Kenneth Clarke said Andrew Neil had been removed because Andrew Neil's article about corruption in the Malaysian government of Mahathir Mohamad conflicted with Murdoch's desire to acquire a television franchise in the country.
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The Malaysian prime minister at the time told Clarke on a ministerial visit that he had achieved Andrew Neil's sacking after a telephone conversation with Murdoch.
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Andrew Neil did not return to his job as Sunday Times editor.
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Andrew Neil has not enjoyed great success with the circulations of the newspapers.
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Andrew Neil exchanged his role as chief executive of Press Holdings for chairman in July 2008.
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Andrew Neil is chairman of the Press Holdings title The Spectator.
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Since 2006 Andrew Neil has been chair of the Dubai-based publishing company ITP Media Group.
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Andrew Neil acted as a television newsreader in two films: Dirty Weekend and Parting Shots, both directed by Michael Winner.
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Andrew Neil was instrumental in the company's launch, overseeing the transformation of a downmarket, single-channel satellite service into a four-channel network in less than a year.
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Andrew Neil commented on the various controversies provoked by the paper while he was editor.
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The latter ended in 2018 and was replaced by Politics Live, which Andrew Neil presented until he left the corporation.
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Andrew Neil presented Sunday Politics on BBC One between 2012 and 2017 and occasionally guest presented Newsnight on BBC Two following host Jeremy Paxman's departure in 2014.
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Andrew Neil played an important part of the BBC general election night coverage in both 2010 and 2015.
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Andrew Neil interviewed various celebrities on the River Thames for the 2010 election and political figures in the studio for the 2015 election.
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Andrew Neil provided commentary on foreign elections, and with Katty Kay led the BBC's overnight live coverage of the US presidential election in 2016.
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In May 2019, Andrew Neil interviewed Ben Shapiro, an American conservative commentator, on Politics Live on BBC Two.
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On 24 September 2019, Andrew Neil presented a live programme on BBC One entitled BBC News Special: Politics in Crisis, addressing the Supreme Court judgement which deemed Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament unlawful.
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On 15 July 2020 the BBC announced that Andrew Neil was in talks about an interview show on BBC One.
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On 25 September 2020, Andrew Neil announced his exit from the BBC to become chairman of GB News, a news channel launched on 13 June 2021.
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Andrew Neil spent months in his hiatus involved in legal disputes with GB News over ending his contract.
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Andrew Neil later called his decision to lead the channel the "single biggest mistake" of his career, comparing the channel to Fox News.
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In January 2022, it was reported that Andrew Neil was in talks with Channel 4 about presenting a weekly politics show to be launched later in 2022.
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The Andrew Neil Show launched with an interview with cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Neil was joined by journalists Pippa Crerar and Madeline Grant.
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Andrew Neil was a vocal and enthusiastic proponent of British military involvement in Afghanistan.
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Andrew Neil derided those who opposed the war as "wimps with no will to fight", while labelling The Guardian as The Daily Terrorist and the New Statesman as the New Taliban for publishing dissenting opinions about the wisdom of British military involvement.
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Andrew Neil compared Tony Blair to Winston Churchill and Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler, while describing the United States invasion of Afghanistan as a "calibrated response" and a "patient, precise and successful deployment of US military power".
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Andrew Neil has been accused of rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change and has been criticised for frequently inviting non-scientists and climate change deniers to deny climate change on his BBC programmes.
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In 2012, Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said that Andrew Neil had "rarely, if ever, included a climate scientist in any of its debates about global warming" on his BBC programme Daily Politics.
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Ward wrote that Andrew Neil let inaccurate and misleading statements about climate change go unchallenged on Daily Politics.
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In November 2020, Andrew Neil said that climate change was real and needed to be confronted.
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Andrew Neil chose instead to blame an employee, stating that he had placed faith in a trusted correspondent who was found to be wrong.
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In January 1997, ITV broadcast a live television debate Monarchy: The Nation Decides, in which Andrew Neil spoke in favour of establishing a republic.
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Formerly dubbed the "Bachelor of Fleet Street", Andrew Neil married Susan Nilsson on 8 August 2015.
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Andrew Neil had dated the Swedish civil and structural engineer for several years.
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Andrew Neil is a resident of France and has homes in London and New York.
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Andrew Neil denies ever meeting Epstein and argues he was put in his infamous "black book" by Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's procurer.