Michael Crick is journalist, biographer and broadcaster.
Born in 1958, Crick was educated at Manchester Grammar School and New College, Oxford, where he was President of the Oxford Union, edited Cherwell and founded the Oxford Handbook. After two years as a trainee journalist with ITN, he was a founder member of Channel 4 News in 1982, and later served as the programme’s Washington Correspondent. He joined the BBC in 1990, first as a reporter on Panorama, and since 1992 with Newsnight, where he has a reputation for pursuing politicians. He won a Royal Television Society award in 1989, and another in 2002 for his Panorama special on Jeffrey Archer.
Michael Crick’s first book, Militant, published in 1984, is still acknowledged as the definite account of how the Trotskyist Militant Tendency infiltrated the Labour Party. This was followed by Scargill and the Miners (1985) and Manchester United: The Betrayal of a Legend (1989). More recently he has examined the lives of three highly controversial public figures, with Jeffrey Archer, Stranger than Fiction (1995); Michael Heseltine: A Biography (1997) and The Boss: The Many Sides of Alex Ferguson (2002). He has also published a collection of trivia about Manchester United.
“Michael Crick makes biographical fairness into a lethal weapon” – Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times.
“If you are in the public eye, the only thing more disheartening than hearing that MI5 has opened a dossier on you, or being told that you are beginning to appear in more commercials than Carol Vorderman, is hearing that Michael Crick in on your case.” – Joe Joseph, The Times
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