Andrew Neil is a publisher, editor, writer, broadcaster, public speaker and business consultant on media matters working out of London, New York, Edinburgh and France.
Since 1996 he has been Publisher (chief executive and editor-in-chief) of Press Holdings, owners of The Business in London and The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and Evening News in Edinburgh.
He has presented both The Daily Politics on BBC Two and This Week on BBC One since January 2003. He is chairman of BusinessEurope.com (a pan-European site for the European business executive) and The Scotsman.com (an online portal to all things Scottish).
During his career he has been UK Editor of The Economist, Editor of The Sunday Times, Executive Chairman of Sky Television, Executive Editor of Fox Television News of America and a leading anchorman on British political television programmes.
Andrew Neil became American correspondent of The Economist in 1979, working out of New York and Washington. He covered the Iranian hostage crisis and the 1980 presidential election as White House correspondent for the magazine and also wrote on Wall Street and US business. He returned to London in 1982 to become UK Editor of The Economist.
In 1983 Andrew Neil became editor of the prestigious Sunday Times of London and remained in that post for 11 years (until end-1994). He developed the newspaper into the undisputed 10-section market leader (which it remains today), breaking many scoops and putting the paper into the midst of many controversies in the process.
While still editing The Sunday Times, Andrew Neil presided over the successful launch of Sky Television, the new satellite service that brought multi-channel TV to Britain. Within a year Sky had already reached 1m homes. Today Sky, now BSkyB, is one of the most successful television ventures in the world. His task of launching Sky and seeing it through its first difficult year completed, Neil returned to being a full-time editor. He had been Executive Chairman of Sky from 1988 to 1990.
Since 1996 he has presented live prime-time special reports for BBC2 every autumn from all three British party political conferences; in the 1996 US presidential election year he also covered the San Diego and Chicago conventions; in 2000 he broadcast live from New York on US election night for BBC radio; in 2001 he anchored a daily BBC network news show on the British general election. On British election night he commented on the results for CNN.
Andrew Neil is much in demand worldwide as a speaker on British, American and European politics/economics, the future of the euro and the dollar and the impact of information technology on business, with special emphasis on the opportunity and challenge of electronic commerce, on which he has spoken to most of the world’s major IT companies.