We said goodbye to one of broadcasting’s best-known and most inspiring characters last week when Alastair Stewart retired from his permanent role as a senior presenter at GB News.
It marked the end of a television career lasting from the 1970s to the present day. Alastair’s wife Sally and three of their four children were there to join in a send-off in the GB News studios at Paddington with speeches, shared stories of great times, and a video canter through some of the highlights of the past 50 years.
As a friend and former colleague who, like Alastair, joined ITN in 1980, I was delighted to be asked to pay a farewell tribute to the man who had been the UK’s longest-serving national news presenter. I reminded colleagues of Alastair’s journey from “long-haired, left-wing firebrand leader of the National Union of Students” to one of the country’s most experienced and skilled presenters of news and political programmes.
Alastair had spent 40 years at ITN after joining them from Southern Television where he had been a reporter since 1976. He became one of three full-time industrial correspondents covering the strikes, picket lines and turmoil of the early days of Thatcherism, including the bitter year-long miners’ strike of 1984.
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He became a news presenter at ITN in the mid-80s, joining such heavy hitters as Alastair Burnet, Sandy Gall, Martyn Lewis, Anna Ford and Leonard Parkin. In those days ITN was based in Wells Street, not far from Oxford Circus. As I reminded Alastair on Thursday there was a bar on the top floor and – in case that was too far to go – a wine bar ten yards from the front door (it went broke within a week of ITN moving away) and four pubs within a 60-second walk. And you could smoke and drink at your desk too. So we did. None of that stopped ITN becoming the most dynamic and dominant force in television news through the 1980s and 1990 and Alastair was at the heart of it all.
He became a political specialist, taking a leading role in General Election night coverage from Thatcher to Cameron and demonstrating an astonishing mastery of facts, figures and personalities about every one of the 650 constituencies. He cemented his own place in history by presenting the first ever televised Party Leaders’ Debate before the election of 2010.
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He’s been an astonishingly versatile broadcaster. He was a presenter and reporter for Channel 4 News, spent a year as ITN’s Washington correspondent and was one of the lead presenters for ITN’s Newschannel, which provided genuine rolling news competition to the BBC and Sky News for several years with only a fraction of their resources.
Alastair and I were together in Berlin when the Wall came down in 1989. Two years later he was reporting from Saudi Arabia as Western forces prepared to drive Iraqi troops out of occupied Kuwait in the Gulf War and was the first person to present the news from liberated territory, nervelessly delivering the News at Ten ‘bongs’ – the headlines – from a scrap of paper by torchlight.
He is genuinely ‘A Man For All Seasons’. In between all this work he found time to take part in Celebrity Mastermind and won by answering questions on his beloved Rolling Stones. He and his wife Sally and their children started keeping horses and donkeys and supporting charities promoting their welfare.
Alastair was a key figure in the launch of GB News in 2021, a box-office name which did much to add credibility and attract bright young talent. He believed in its mission to open up a wider front of debate about important issues and his programmes did exactly that. He was rigorous, fair and open-minded in his presenting and interviewing, with leading figures from politics, the arts, the armed forces and sport happily joining him on his weekend programmes.
GB News’s chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, paid tribute to Alastair at the farewell party, praising his broadcasting skills and his enthusiastic support for the fledgling channel from its early days. He also singled out his kindness and his mentoring and support of younger staff, many of whom had not even been born when Alastair’s career started back in the 1970s. He had been a great example to them all and their devotion to him was obvious.
Alastair told the gathering he had been “thrilled to bits” to be part of the first few years of GB News and that “it meant the world to him to be able to help and support the next generation of journalists on their journey”. He ended: “You should cherish this place because it really matters to British television and British journalism that this place succeeds and thrives.”
Happy retirement Alastair. Thanks for the memories.
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