In June 2024 he additionally began hosting a daily broadcast for Times Radio providing political analysis, commentary, interviews and debates.

[15] In his first editorial, on 9 October 1983, Neil advised Margaret Thatcher's government to "move to the right on industrial policy (trust-bust, deregulate, privatise wherever it produces more competition and efficiency) and centre-left in economic strategy (a few billion extra in capital spending would have little impact on interest rates or inflation but could give a lift to a shaky economic recovery)".

[16] The Sunday Times strongly supported the stationing of American cruise missiles in bases in Britain after the Soviet Union installed SS-20s in Eastern Europe, and it criticised the resurgent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

[18] In Neil's first year as the paper's editor, The Sunday Times had revealed the date of the deployment of cruise missiles, exposed how Mark Thatcher had channelled the gains from his consultancy business into a bank account and reported on Robert Mugabe's atrocities in Matabeleland.

[21] During his editorship, the newspaper lost a libel case over claims that it had made concerning a witness, Carmen Proetta, who was interviewed after her appearance in the Death on the Rock documentary on the Gibraltar shootings.

[32] He apparently did not know about Bordes,[31] which the Telegraph had accepted by the time the libel case came to High Court of Justice in January 1990,[30] but the paper still defended their coverage as fair comment.

[36] The Sunday Times Magazine of 26 November 1989 was largely devoted to Murray's report, which found that the British underclass consisted of people existing on welfare, the black economy and crime, with illegitimacy being the single most reliable predictor.

[37] The accompanying editorial said Britain was in the midst of a "social tragedy of Dickensian proportions", with an underclass "characterized by drugs, casual violence, petty crime, illegitimate children, homelessness, work avoidance and contempt for conventional values".

[42] Neil blamed Thatcher for high inflation, "misplaced chauvinism" over Europe, and the poll tax, concluding that she had become an "electoral liability" and must therefore be replaced by Heseltine.

[42][43] In an editorial of January 1988 ("Modernize the monarchy"), Neil advocated the abolition of both the preference for males in the law of succession and of the exclusion of Catholics from the throne.

[44] Subsequent editorials of The Sunday Times called for the Queen to pay income tax and advocated a scaled-down monarchy that would not be class-based but which would be "an institution with close links to all classes.

[47] In 1992 Neil was criticised by anti-Nazi groups[48] and historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper[49] for employing the Holocaust denier David Irving to translate the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.

The Malaysian prime minister at the time told Clarke on a ministerial visit that he had achieved Neil's sacking after a telephone conversation with Murdoch.

[52][53] The British minister of state for trade Richard Needham criticised Neil and the newspaper for potentially putting thousands of jobs at risk.

[54] Neil's departure from his role as Sunday Times editor was officially reported in 1994 as being merely temporary, as he was to present and edit a current affairs programme for Fox in New York.

[59][60] In January 2024, Neil told BBC Newsnight that he would quit his role as chairman of The Spectator if a UAE-US consortium is successful in its proposed takeover of the magazine and its sister publication the Daily Telegraph.

[62][63] In June 2008, Neil led a consortium which bought talent agency Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) from CSS Stellar plc for £4 million, making him chairman of the new company in addition to his other activities.

[65] In the course of the series Neil interviewed a wide variety of personalities, from Albert Reynolds and Morris Cerullo to Jimmy Savile and Max Clifford.

[94][95] Later that month, on the BBC's Question Time, he said that he had left his roles at GB News over the direction the channel was taking, and that he had become a "minority of one" within senior management.

Neil derided those who opposed the war as "wimps with no will to fight", while labelling The Guardian as The Daily Terrorist and the New Statesman as the New Taliban for publishing dissenting opinions about the wisdom of British military involvement.

[103] He compared Tony Blair to Winston Churchill and Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler, while describing the United States invasion of Afghanistan as a "calibrated response" and a "patient, precise and successful deployment of US military power".

[103][105] Neil was an early advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, describing the case for war and regime change advanced by Tony Blair and George W. Bush as "convincing" and "masterful".

[105] In 2002, Neil wrote that Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide shopping spree to buy the technology and material needed to construct weapons of mass destruction – and the missile systems needed to deliver them across great distances", and that "the suburbs of Baghdad are now dotted with secret installations, often posing as hospitals or schools, developing missile fuel, bodies and guidance systems, chemical and biological warheads and, most sinister of all, a renewed attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

[111][better source needed] Ward wrote in The Guardian in 2011 that Neil let inaccurate and misleading statements about climate change go unchallenged on Daily Politics.

[114] Articles and editorials in The Sunday Times cast doubt on the scientific consensus, described HIV as a "politically correct virus" about which there was a "conspiracy of silence," disputed that AIDS was spreading in Africa, claimed that tests for HIV were invalid, described the HIV/AIDS treatment drug azidothymidine (AZT) as harmful, and characterised the World Health Organization (WHO) as an "Empire-building AIDS [organisation].

[114] In response to this, The Sunday Times published an article headlined "AIDS – why we won't be silenced", which said that Nature engaged in censorship and "sinister intent".

"[116] In a 2021 interview Neil said that he now regretted certain aspects of the paper's coverage of HIV and AIDS, but he was unwilling or unable to accept any personal responsibility for the falsehoods published while he was editor.

[117] In January 1997, ITV broadcast a live television debate Monarchy: The Nation Decides, in which Neil spoke in favour of establishing a republic.

Typically, a reader will ask the editor if he has any photographs relevant to some topical news item, frequently with a veiled allusion to the age-gap between two individuals, or to ethnic diversity.

[6] Neil lives in Grasse in the south of France and also has homes in Chelsea, London and Midtown Manhattan, New York City, an apartment within the Trump World Tower.