‘I had a serious heart issue this year – I feared for my health’
Back with a new politics show, the veteran journalist talks to Harry de Quetteville about the BBC, Ukraine, ‘wokery’ – and how GB News was a ‘huge mistake’
‘Where shall we start?” asks Andrew Neil, comfortably ensconced in an office in a Georgian townhouse off St James’s Park. “I think we have to pick up where we left off last time, don’t you?”
It is odd this, asking unflinching questions of a man who has made his name doing the same. But Neil doesn’t bristle for a moment. He knows that, though one of the nation’s most celebrated journalists – scourge of politicians not as on top of their briefs as they should be, or as he is – he has become a news story himself.
That’s because when “we left off last time” – last June – he was, with great fanfare, launching GB News. “There’s a lot hanging on this,” he told me then about the fledgling conservative TV channel.
Yet almost immediately after it began broadcasting, this same Andrew Neil, one of the media’s most experienced old hands, found he had made a schoolboy error – committing to be the face of a project over which he had precious little control. Repeated technical glitches proved humiliating, and within days his role had descended into acrimony and farce. After just a week, he’d decided to quit. How on earth did he get himself so tangled up?
“It was a huge mistake,” he concedes. “I should have been tougher demanding that we didn’t launch when we did.” The enthusiasm he’d exuded last June had, in fact, been a façade: “I must have hidden the trepidation because I knew we were in trouble [before launch].”
Now he is enthusiastic again – thrilled to be out of a station that has lurched Right-wards since his departure, framing itself around the altogether different personality of Nigel Farage. Will it survive? “I think so – but I don’t think anybody can deny that the channel remains haunted by its launch.”
So too is he. The stress, he has said since, might have killed him. Certainly, Neil’s health deteriorated. Last winter, his heart started beating irregularly. It got so bad that, in early January, disembarking at Nice airport, from where he commutes to his home in Grasse, Provence’s “perfume country”, he realised he could barely make it up the ramp connecting the plane and terminal: “I immediately had to go to the doctor.”
Since then, he has had an operation to shock his heart back into the correct rhythm. “I’m wearing a heart monitor now,” he says. “It’s been a wake-up call. I’ve started to lose weight, which I needed to do, and cut down on alcohol, which for many of us had got too excessive during lockdown.”
He doesn’t definitively blame the GB News debacle for the heart tremors, but nor does he excuse his former employers. “I did say at the time to GB News, ‘I fear for my health’, so I think it vindicated my decision to get out. [The stress] may have had a lingering effect. At my age, you need to take care of yourself.”
He’s 73, and though he doesn’t bound up the stairs these days, nor does he have any plans to retire. A new live Sunday evening show on Channel 4, with the working title Sunday Politics with Andrew Neil, launches May 8. Naturally, he wants to land big interviews, though he accepts the biggest will continue to avoid a Neil grilling. “Will you get the PM?” I ask. “Almost certainly not,” he laughs.
What he really wants to do is recreate the cosy yet oppositional chemistry that Labour’s Diane Abbott and former Tory minister Michael Portillo produced on the sofa of his BBC One show, This Week, for almost a decade, until its cancellation in 2019.
“I want a regular team. People made an appointment to see Diane and to see Michael. To like him, dislike him; like her, dislike her. I want people to realise when they tune in on a Sunday night, they pretty much know who’s going to be there.” That, he adds, is very much how they do things in America, and US broadcasting – in Neil’s book – is the unimprovable model: “The energy, the graphics, the music.” He says he’s been watching MSNBC and Fox in Ukraine, and how impressed he is by them.
It is part of a love affair with the States that has been ongoing since Neil’s early 30s, when he was dispatched there as a journalist for The Economist, and returned transformed, a fully fledged free-marketeer in the Reagan mould. That world view, combined with his own energy, and the restless ambition of a young, working-class Glaswegian in a middle-class London media industry, soon brought him to the attention of Rupert Murdoch, another iconoclastic outsider. In 1983, Murdoch made Neil editor of The Sunday Times, where he remained for 11 years, thereafter hopping from one media lily pad to another like the grandee he had become.
Increasingly, that work included TV. “Television creates celebrities,” he observes. But though he became feared and famed as an interviewer, somehow he never landed the big BBC show – Question Time, Newsnight – that seemed his due.
There is no acrimony, certainly not now. And he is full of praise for the corporation’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. “The BBC has been fantastic. Clive Myrie has become a national figure. Quentin Sommerville, on the frontline, with bodies on the ground… it’s just amazing. If there’s a justification for the BBC, this is it.”
The problem is, he’s not sure there is a justification for the BBC, certainly not as it is currently constituted. The licence fee, he thinks, is out of date and out of touch. “I can’t believe that a funding mechanism invented in 1922 can still be right in 2022, in a world of streamers and voluntary subscription.”
The £4billion that the fee guarantees is a “great asset” to the corporation, he understands, but also “an enormous albatross that forces it to do far too much, to span the waterfront”. Also, he says, it prevents it from raising money “from the market” to compete in a Netflix world, where an hour of drama costs upwards of £10million to make, and £4billion is “chicken feed”.
“The Neil solution would be to define public service broadcasting, like documentaries, some drama, where there’s market failure, and finance that through general taxation” – to the tune of less than £1billion a year, doled out by a commission for public broadcasting. Not all of it would necessarily go to the BBC; ITV, and Neil’s new employers, Channel 4, might get some too. “For everything else, it would be a voluntary subscription service. And if the BBC is as good as it thinks it is, and I think it’s very good, then why wouldn’t you pay a subscription? It would take so much pressure off the BBC, which would be fit for purpose for the streaming age.”
The temptation within the corporation, he knows, is to fight for the status quo. But that would be fatal. “That is the way to becoming today’s Upper Clyde shipbuilders.”
The Ukraine war hasn’t just been good for the BBC; “I don’t know if it saved the Prime Minister’s career, but it certainly saved his immediate job prospects.” Neil can’t see a Tory putsch now, amid a conflict in which “Mr Johnson” (never Boris, that would be falling into the PM’s trap) has “risen to the occasion when on many other occasions he has not”. Still, it was touch and go. “He was very close to being toppled.”
What rescued him was the intervention of Met Police chief Dame Cressida Dick, announcing an investigation that stalled and diluted an internal report. “He was saved by Knacker of the Yard. I think if the Sue Gray report had come out in all its glory, that could well have been curtains for him. But Mr Johnson has turned out to be quite lucky. He has always been lucky.”
Even so, the war still holds many political dangers for the Government. First, there is the Home Office’s apparent hardheartedness, or incompetence, over refugees: “I just cannot fathom how that could come about. Is it a problem with the Home Secretary? With the Home Office? If there is a problem with the Home Secretary, then Downing Street should move to resolve it.”
Then there is uncomfortable closeness between the Conservative Party and Russian oligarch money. “What other country, other democracy, would do that?” he bristles. “Money! [The Tories] didn’t ask too many questions. And it’s come back to bite them, big time. When you look back at it, it is quite remarkable just how much money they took and just how close they got to them. It was clear it wouldn’t pass the smell test. It just doesn’t. I think it’s tainted the political process.”
A man who made his path through life, Neil has never been a fan of the Establishment. He thinks the Upper House, now home to Lord Evgeny ennobled by PM despite the reported reservations of the security services, should be turned into a “nightclub”. “The Lords,” he says, “is beyond reform.”
For Britain more widely, though, and in particular a Brexit Britain many claimed would be enfeebled on the international stage, the war has been anything but toxic. Rather, it has, Neil thinks, “vindicated a lot of what Britain stood for” – by which he means defence spending, and close ties with America. Nor has British influence, in pushing for tougher sanctions and deadlier weapons shipments to Kyiv, been diminished. “Rather than Britain fading to irrelevance, what’s faded to irrelevance is Merkelism. Sixteen years of Chancellor Merkel and it has all gone. Gone overnight, gone in 24 hours. It’s amazing.”
It is a fundamental reset that he hopes will go beyond politics to the public square. For in his mind, our national political debate, as we all live it, needs to wean itself off the addiction of cheap, visceral “culture war” spats, which animate and are animated by every issue from gender, to vaccination, to masks. “You never hear politicians today talk about housing. What could be more important?” Serious to-and-fro about the cost of living, foreign policy and the defence of the nation have disappeared, he thinks. “The condition of the people”, as he puts it, the bedrock of debate in decades past, are all gone. “We have allowed public discourse to be hijacked by debate about the largely irrelevant.”
But elevating the trivial to the critical has not itself had trivial consequences. “It has emboldened the autocrats. They look at what we’re arguing about and they think it’s the last days of the Roman Empire. They think: ‘What a decadent, useless bunch they are, arguing about these things…’”
He mentions JK Rowling’s run-in with transgender activists (“my attitude is the same as JK Rowling’s”) in a kind of despair. “[Rowling] said something about transgender that people hate and there’s a huge pile-on, with people trying to destroy her. Sitting in Beijing or the Kremlin or in Riyadh, you’d think: ‘They’ve lost it. They’re turning on their own.’”
Obsessing tribally about such causes, to the exclusion of all others,
‘I must have hidden the trepidation because I knew GB News was in trouble before launch’
‘This century has been the age of the autocrats. My hope is Ukraine is the turning point’
has, in his view, done no less than corrupt and endanger Western liberal democracies.
On the extreme Left, he says, “wokery” evolved to form a cancel culture in which “it’s not enough that I think you’re wrong. If I think you’re wrong, you must not be allowed to say it.” Universities where such cultures become entrenched, he says, “cease to be instruments of the Enlightenment, and become an instrument of oppression”. He mentions the case of the University of Sussex, where professor of philosophy Kathleen Stock was targeted by a hate campaign and eventually left her job after being accused of “transphobic” views.
What he calls the “hard Right, the populist Right” so hated this, in his view, that they stupidly embraced anyone who rejected it. “They started having love affairs with Putin and [Turkish president, Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and [Brazilian president, Jair] Bolsonaro, and suddenly, democracy didn’t matter so much. Because there was a social conservatism to the dictators, the populist Right developed an admiration for them. They said: ‘These guys are not into LGBT rights, they don’t waste their time on that.’” Suddenly, “Mr Farage” (never Nigel) was publicly avowing his admiration for Putin. “Really? Would you say that about Hitler? I don’t think so.”
It is a pincer movement of intolerance, he suggests, that has evolved in the absence of issues of greater consequence. “We face these growing anti-democratic forces on the Left and the Right, which have undermined our unity, and the idea that we can be divided on lots of issues, but at the end, we’re united in our democracy, and our freedom to say what we want.”
But in the carnage and catastrophe of Ukraine, he says, that might be changing. “This century has been the age of the autocrats. Countries that were marginally autocratic, have become much more authoritarian, and countries that were authoritarian – Russia, China – have become totalitarian. My hope is Ukraine is the turning point. That it is a step too far, and it has woken us up.”
And with that, he is off. He has a plane to catch, back to Nice, and to his wife Susan, a Swedish engineer 20 years his junior, whom he married in 2015, and whose support during the GB News fiasco he valued enormously. This time there will be no palpitations preventing him climbing the ramp to the terminal. He waves goodbye, an avuncular figure, all smiles, no trace of the terror of Wapping of 40 years ago.
Neil seems to be enjoying himself, perhaps even to have softened. “It turns out, I do have a heart,” he says, joking that his doctors were unsure if they’d find one.
But then he is more serious. “You know, the heart thing was a bit of a blow. I’m not used to medical things.” The last time he was in hospital – “for the most minor of elective surgery procedures”, he says – “was the day Captain Bob [Robert Maxwell] walked off the back of his yacht, nearly 30 years ago. Before that, it was to have my tonsils out. Now, though, I’m getting some of my mojo back.”