The career

Richard Littlejohn is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and best-selling author. His twice-weekly columns in The Daily Mail and The Sun earned him a place in the inaugural Newspaper Hall of Fame as one of the most influential journalists of the past 40 years.

He has been Fleet Street’s Columnist of the Year and was named Irritant of the Year by the BBC’s What The Papers Say awards for his unrivalled ability to get up the noses of the Establishment.

His extensive radio and television work has brought him both a Sony award and a Silver Rose of Montreux.

He started writing a column at London’s Evening Standard, wrote a weekly column for Punch and also contributes to The Spectator.

His satirical novel To Hell In A Handcart was the fastest-selling fiction paperback on its release in 2001 and described by Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph as a Bonfire of the Vanities for Middle England.

Littlejohn’s highly-acclaimed non-fiction book You Couldn’t Make It Up skewered John Major’s Conservative government.

Littlejohn’s Britain did the same for the Blair years and became a Sunday Times Number 1 best-seller.

His new book, Littlejohn's House of Fun, reflects on 13 years of Labour madness, with special emphasis on the disastrous Gordon Brown era.

Littlejohn has no party political affiliations and believes journalists should be in a state of permanent opposition and scepticism, opposed to vested interests of all political persuasions and fiercely protective of civil liberties.

His job is to sit at the back and throw bottles.

PRESS

EARLY CAREER

Richard Littlejohn started on a now defunct local weekly, the Peterborough Standard, in 1971. He clawed his way up through the traditional route of births, deaths and marriages, steam engine rallies, agricultural fairs and local council meetings, working for news agencies and evening papers and contributing to regional and local radio and TV.
He joined the Birmingham Evening Mail as an industrial correspondent in 1977, specialising in the motor industry and covered the Winter of Discontent.

In 1979, Littlejohn arrived in Fleet Street on the Evening Standard and was plunged straight in to the ITV strike, which blacked out screens in the run-up to Christmas. He was appointed deputy news editor, but opted to return to the labour and industrial beat when the Standard merged with the Evening News.
This was a time of major industrial unrest, which culminated in the miners' strike and the Wapping print dispute. Littlejohn was deeply involved in the struggle for the soul of the Labour Party in the 1980s, exposing union ballot rigging and Far Left infiltration, credited by the Financial Times with helping to force a re-run of the election for general secretary of Britain's then biggest union, the TGWU. After spending a month on the 1987 Neil Kinnock election bus, Littlejohn moved to feature and leader writing and was given his own column by the late John Leese.

In 1989, Kelvin Mackenzie hired Littlejohn to write a twice-weekly column for The Sun, a signature mix or polemic, sketches and satire directed at the decaying Conservative government. When Mackenzie left in 1994, Littlejohn departed soon after for the Daily Mail. He returned to The Sun in 1998 and stayed until 2005.

Littlejohn is now back at The Daily Mail, where he first worked under Paul Dacre from 1994 to 1998. He rejoined the paper at the beginning of 2006 and writes a twice-weekly column, which appears every Tuesday and Friday and is coruscating about New Labour and the bureaucratic insanities of the Guardianistas. He also contributes commentaries and essays and has a keen interest in American politics.

MAGAZINES

Littlejohn wrote a regular column for the now defunct Punch magazine, under David Thomas. It was called Who Gives A Monkeys?
He has also contributed commentaries, diaries and reviews to The Spectator.

BROADCAST

TELEVISION

In the early 1990s, Littlejohn's first real experience of TV came as a presenter of Granada's long-running What The Papers Say, which used to be produced in Manchester and is now, sadly, no longer with us.
He graduated to a stool on the David Frost programme, where he delivered short satirical commentaries.

In 1994, LWT head of factual programming Trevor Phillips (now head of the Equalities Commission) hired Richard to make Littlejohn Live and Uncut, a late-night mix of current affairs debates, showbiz, rock and roll and general madness. It ran for three series, regularly attracting a third of the Friday night television audience.



After guest presenting the hit show Central Weekend Live in Birmingham, executive producer Steve Clark asked Richard to co-present the programme's first series in London.
Littlejohn went on to present Do I Not Like That, a late-night football debate show and two documentaries for Carlton, one making the case for London's Olympic bid, the other examing the vast subsidies London and the South East pays to Scotland.



When Kelvin Mackenzie became head of Sky TV in 1994, he hired Richard to present a five-nights-a-week show on Sky News, a mix of current affairs, politics, phone-in and showbiz. The template was set by the first show, which featured an exclusive interview with Colin Stagg, the man wrongly accused of the Wimbledon Common murders, and former Kinks frontman Ray Davies. By the time it launched, Mackenzie had left and the series ran for a year.
This was the first of three stints at Sky. In 1998, Richard made Littlejohn, Live and Unleashed, for Sky One, an attempt to recreate Live and Uncut on acid for a new satellite audience, which gave the one and only TV appearance to a team of stripping dwarves called The Half Monty. The show was pulled after one series.
In 2002, Richard returned to Sky News under Tony Ball, to present Littlejohn, a four-nights a week talk show, executive produced by Steve Clark, which ran for two years.

Richard hosted Wanted, the first Channel 4 reality show, which won a Silver Rose of Montreux award in 1996.
In 2007, he wrote and presented The War On Britain's Jews, a documentary on the unholy alliance between the Hard Left and Islamist extremists which has contributed to the alarming rise of a new breed on anti-Semitism in Britain.








Littlejohn has been a regular panellist on the BBC's flagship current affairs show Question Time for the past 15 years. In 2004 he took part in a live QT from Miami during the American presidential election campaign, alongside the Left-wing documentary maker Michael Moore, who Littlejohn described as 'The Lord Haw-Haw of the War on Terror'.




RADIO

Richard began a fledgling radio career in the 1970s, contributing to local and regional programmes, covering everything from singing dustmen to football matches and by-elections.

After appearing regularly on a number of LBC programmes, Richard was given his own daily show, Littlejohn's Long Lunch. When Michael Parkinson stood down from the morning show in 1992, Richard took over. The show ran for two years until the Radio Authority stripped LBC of its licence. This was widely attributed to the scathing daily attacks on John Major's Conservative government by Littlejohn and the brilliant breakfast show how, Australian Mike Carlton.


In 1997, Roger Mosey hired Richard Littlejohn to present Radio 5 Live's Wednesday night football phone-in. Within a year, the show had won a Sony radio award and Richard took over the flagship Saturday night phone- in 6-0-6, which he presented for four years and took to record listenership.
He was also a regular guest presenter of Radio 2's Jimmy Young Show and has appeared on a number of other BBC radio shows, including Steve Wright and Start the Week.