Andrew Neil

About

Andrew Neil

Andrew Neil is a publisher, broadcaster, speaker and company chairman working out of London, New York, Dubai and the Côte d’Azur.

He was named UK Journalist of the Year in 2013 by Britain’s prestigious Political Studies Association and one of the 500 most influential people in the UK by Debrett’s in 2015.

In March 2015 The Times said: “The ultimate test for assessing whether a party leader was fit to be Prime Minister is to put them in front of Andrew Neil for 40 minutes, the most forensic interviewer in broadcasting.”

Famously, in the 2019 British General Election, Boris Johnson refused to be interviewed by him.

In April 2016, a poll of UK Members of Parliament voted him the best overall political journalist in the country.

In the 2019 General Election his prime-time interviews with the party leaders were among the most talked-about broadcast events of the election, including the one Boris Johnson refused to do!

In 2019 he was named “Broadcaster of the Year” by the Political Studies Association.

In 2020 he was named “Broadcaster of the Year” by the London Press Club.

In the course of his career, he has interviewed seminal world leaders such Kofi Anan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson; Boris Yeltsin; Nicholas Sarkozy and Valery Giscard D’Estaing; PW Botha.

In September 2020 he announced he was leaving the BBC to be Chairman and lead prime time presenter of GB News, a new news channel to be launched early 2021.

His final major broadcast for the BBC was to anchor BBC TV’s 10-hour global coverage (BBC1, BBC News and BBC World) of the US election results on November 3^rd, as he did from Times Square in 2016.

He is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Press Holdings Media Group, publishers of The Spectator, Spectator Australia, Spectator USA and Apollo, the world-renowned art magazine. He launched Spectator Australia in 2009 and Spectator USA in 2018. In April 2020, The Spectator published its 10,000^th edition, a first in global publishing since no magazine in the world has ever published 10,000 editions. The UK edition alone now has over 100,000 subscribers and has never been more profitable.

During his 25 years with the BBC Andrew presented a variety of live political shows from  The Andrew Neil Show to Politics Live on BBC2. For 16 years, until 2019, he presented the award-winning cult show, This Week on BBC1. He presented three editions of the Daily Politics on BBC2 every week from 2003 til 2018; and the Sunday Politics on BBC1 (2012 til 2017).

He also presented live prime time specials on BBC1 and BBC2 on major political events, such as Brexit and the Labour and Conservative leadership races. During general elections he conducted the main interviews with the party leaders (bar Boris Johnson, who was too scared to be interviewed by him, in 2019).

He is much in demand on the UK/European/global speaker circuit and for chairing major conferences, at which he excels. He speaks on geopolitics and specializes on the politics/economics of the UK, EU, US and Middle East; and how to do business in the digital age.

In recent years he has been chairman of ITP, the biggest magazine publisher in the Gulf, based in Dubai (from 2005 to 2016). He still acts for ITP as senior consultant and hosts their most prestigious events in the Gulf, London and New York.

He has covered US politics and business extensively since the 1970s, from making a 60-minute documentary on the Tea Party, which was distributed worldwide, to anchoring the BBC’s global results coverage of the 2016 presidential election live from Times Square.

During his career, Andrew has been a House of Commons political correspondent in London, White House correspondent in Washington DC and Wall Street correspondent in New York – all for The Economist. He was made British Editor of The Economist in 1982.

The following year he left The Economist, to become Editor of The Sunday Times of London, one of the world’s most prestigious and influential newspapers. Over the next 11 years he turned it into the undisputed multi-section market leader, renowned for its investigative journalism and scoops.

While still editing The Sunday Times he also served as Executive Chairman of Sky Television, which he launched in 1989 as Britain’s first multi-channel satellite TV platform. He created Sky News and brought The Simpsons to British screens. Sky was recently sold to Comcast for over £30bn.

He has been a member of the International Advisory Board of Al Jazeera, the international news channel based in Doha, Qatar; and Publisher of The Scotsman Group of newspapers in Edinburgh (1995-2005).

He has lectured on politics, economics, international relations, business and the digital revolution to some of the most important companies in the world, including Microsoft, Oracle, HSBC, SAP, American Express, Barclays, Arabian Business, NBC News, Janus Henderson, Aberdeen Standard, Barclays and Citibank.

Born in Scotland, he graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1971 with an MA (Hons) in Political Economy, Political Science and American History.

In October 1996 Macmillan published his autobiography “Full Disclosure”, on his Sunday Times and Sky TV years, which was serialized in Vanity Fair in America and the Daily Mail in Britain.

Andrew holds several honorary degrees. In 1999 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews, one of the oldest and most distinguished universities in the world. On stepping down from that post he was made a Doctor of Laws by the university. The University of Glasgow, his alma mater and 4^th oldest university in the English-speaking world, awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2018.

When not chairing companies, speaking, travelling or presenting TV shows he likes to ride his bike and walk his dogs on the Cote D’Azur.