His family moved to Ethiopia when he was 3 and he received his primary education there at the English School, which had been founded by his grandmother some 20 years earlier.
[2] The family returned to the UK after the 1974 Ethiopian revolution and he received his secondary education at Magdalen College School, an independent school for boys in Oxford, and sang as a chorister in the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford.
In 1998 he joined the BBC, acting as Home Affairs Producer and Health Correspondent.
He reported on the terrorist attacks in London in July 2005,[5] and the airline "liquid bomb plot" of August 2006.
In May 2020 the BBC was obliged to apologise after 'incorrect' and 'disappointing' claims by Sandford live on air that Welsh borders would not be policed when Welsh Health minister Vaughan Gething and Rhun ap Iorwerth, MS for Ynys Môn criticised his remarks over the difference in COVID-19 lockdown rules in England and Wales.