Richard Littlejohn (born 18 January 1954) is an English author, broadcaster and opinion column writer, having started his career as a journalist.
Littlejohn earned a place in the inaugural Press Gazette Newspaper Hall of Fame[1] as one of the most influential journalists of the past 40 years.
[7] Littlejohn attended West Town Primary School where he passed the eleven-plus, obtaining the highest marks in his year.
[14][better source needed] In 1989, he joined The Sun as a columnist,[15] which attracted controversy, and he was voted "Irritant of the Year" at the 1992 What The Papers Say Awards.
[3] In March 1993 he gave his support to the "Save the New Statesman fund" to raise cash to contest libel suits served on the magazine by the then Prime Minister John Major and caterer Claire Latimer.
[3] In February 1998, Littlejohn became the UK's best-paid columnist when he returned to The Sun to write a twice-weekly column as part of a £1million deal, which also included presenting for BSkyB.
[15] In December 2010, Littlejohn satirised[22] an incident in which a 20-year-old man with cerebral palsy, Jody McIntyre, complained of mistreatment by police at a protest.
[23] In December 2012, the Daily Mail published an apology following a piece written by Littlejohn which suggested that ethnic minority staff had got their jobs through discrimination and had threatened to sue the Equality and Human Rights Commissions.
[24] In February 2011, Littlejohn wrote in his Daily Mail column that Haringey Council was using taxpayer funds for hopscotch lessons for Asian women.
This was an urban myth first propagated in 1995 by the former Conservative Party chairman Brian Mawhinney, who took the name of the Hopscotch Asian Women's Centre literally.
[4] In December 2012, Littlejohn wrote an article criticising the decision of Accrington teacher Lucy Meadows to return to the same school after undergoing Gender Reassignment Surgery.
[32] Blackburn and Hyndburn Coroner Michael Singleton stated that press coverage of her gender reassignment was "ill informed bigotry" and that Littlejohn in his article had "carried out what can only be described as a character assassination, having sought to ridicule and humiliate Lucy Meadows and bring into question her right to pursue her career as a teacher".
[33] In 2013, Littlejohn was accused[5] of taking insufficient care to check the facts before publishing an article critical of cookery writer and poverty campaigner Jack Monroe.
[35] On 15 February 2018, Littlejohn, writing for his Daily Mail column, focused on the news that Tom Daley and his husband Dustin Lance Black were expecting their first child.
He also criticised that in many cases of male gay relationships, Daley and Black included, women were being seen as "mere breeding machines" (their baby's surrogate mother not having been identified) and that offspring were shown off like "commodities".
This culminated in the Radio Authority stating that he "had broken half-a-dozen rules and had incited violence"[38] due to an edition of his phone-in show in which he suggested the police should have used flamethrowers against a group of "militant homosexuals" protesting outside the House of Commons.
[38] On another LBC phone-in he was censured by the Radio Authority for describing the Royal Family as a "bunch of tax-evading adulterers".
[41] After leaving LBC in 1994, Littlejohn was approached by BSkyB managing director (and former Sun editor) Kelvin MacKenzie, and was offered the chance to present a nightly current affairs show on the TV channel Sky News.