Andrew Neil - The Sunday Times

Neil was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 until 1994. His hiring was controversial. It was argued that he was appointed by Rupert Murdoch over more experienced colleagues, such as Hugo Young and Brian MacArthur.

Opposition to perceived public school and Oxbridge attitudes was a hallmark of Neil's Sunday Times editorship. Neil regards the newspaper's revelation of details of Israel's nuclear weapons programme in 1986, using photographs and testimony from former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, as his greatest scoop as an editor. During his editorship, the newspaper lost a libel case over claims it had made concerning a witness interviewed in the Death on the Rock documentary on the Gibraltar shootings.

While at The Sunday Times in 1988, Neil met the former Miss India, Pamella Bordes, in a nightclub. The News of the World suggested she was an up-market prostitute. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne argued, in an article for The Sunday Telegraph, that Neil was not fit to edit a serious Sunday newspaper, on the grounds that "playboys" should not be editors. In a subsequent libel case, Neil sued Worsthorne and won £1,000 plus costs.

The Sunday Times during this period promoted a fringe and later discredited argument that, in Africa, AIDS was a quite separate condition from HIV. In 1992 Neil was criticised by Anti-Nazi groups and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper among others for employing, as a translator of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, the Holocaust denier David Irving.