Michael Crick

Michael Crick has been a journalist for more than 40 years. He was a founder member of Channel 4 News, where he was later Washington Correspondent (1988-90) and Political Correspondent (2011-19). At the BBC he has been a reporter for Panorama; and for Newsnight, where he was Political Editor (2007-11).

Crick’s first book was Militant (1984), about the Trotskyist Militant tendency. His subsequent works have included biographies of Arthur Scargill, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Heseltine and Sir Alex Ferguson. In 2018 he published Sultan of Swing, a biography of the distinguished Oxford psephologist Sir David Butler. His latest book, One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage, was published in early 2022.

He won Royal Television Society awards in 1989 and 2002, and was the RTS Specialist Journalist of the Year in both 2014 and 2018. Also in 2018, Crick was given the Charles Wheeler/British Journalism Review award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism.

He was a lay governor of the University of Manchester from 2012 until 2021, and is still on the board of Manchester University Press. He joined the council of the University of Kent in 2021.

As a pupil at Manchester Grammar School in the 1970s, Crick was the speaker in teams which entered the ESU public speaking competition three years running. In 1975 his MGS team won the national final in Liverpool against other schools whose team members included Sandi Toksvig; the future Tory minister, Sir Alan Duncan; and the future Liberal Democrat peer Jane Bonham-Carter.

Crick read PPE at New College, Oxford, where he was President of the Union, editor of the university newspaper Cherwell, and founded the Oxford Handbook.