Andrew Neil

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2007

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the journalist Andrew Neil. For 11 years he was editor of The Sunday Times. Under him, the paper broke the story of Israel's nuclear capabilities, revealed the Queen's dismay at the tone of Margaret Thatcher's administration and shone a bright light onto the difficulties of Princess Diana and Prince Charles's marriage. But as well as reporting the news, the paper made headlines too - Andrew Neil steered The Sunday Times through its move to Wapping and the bitter and often violent dispute that followed.

Much has been made of his rise to be a figure at the heart of the establishment. A grammar school boy who went on to study at Glasgow University, he threw himself into university life; he edited the student newspaper, was a keen young debater and chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students. It seemed as if he was destined for a life in politics - but he decided he wanted to live a little first and then found that while he revelled in the political debate, the life of an MP was not for him. He is now Editor in Chief at Press Holdings and an established and authoritative political broadcaster.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: First Movement of Violin Concerto in D Major by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Book: Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith Luxury: Wind-up radio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neal. As editor of the Sunday Times he cut an unconventional
0:35.3	swayed through the upper echelons of the broadsheet establishment, responsible
0:39.7	for not just reporting the news, but shaping it. Fearless at embracing change and constantly seeing life as a series of challenges,
0:47.0	along with breaking the biggest stories of the day, he broke the notorious stranglehold of the unions too,
0:53.2	abandoning Fleet Street to take the paper to whopping
0:56.0	in a fierce and often violent dispute.
0:59.0	So then Andrew Neal, editor of the Sunday Times
1:01.0	for 11 years, presiding over a number of significant scoops.
1:05.2	For you what was the biggest?
1:07.1	I think the biggest was probably revealing the full extent of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
1:11.6	After all it was big enough for our only source to be
1:13.7	kidnapped by Mossat if he is really secret service and he then spent 16 years in
1:18.9	jail he's still effectively under house arrest in Israel now. How big a personal decision was it for you to run that story?
1:25.0	It was a huge personal decision and I remember sitting in my office at the Sunday Times
1:29.0	surrounded by my senior editors and I told them all to leave the room and I would give them a decision
1:34.0	in half an hour's time and I walked out of the room and I said prepare pages one two, three, four, five and
1:39.1	and six were going with the story and there was muttering at the background saying this will be
1:44.2	Neil's Hitler diaries. Well of course let's remind ourselves I mean this was only a
1:48.1	few short years after the Sunday Times had suffered as a result of the fake Hitler
1:52.3	Diaries so the importance of it was not just
	...

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