Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (born 7 December 1957) is an English journalist who holds the position of international business editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | |
|---|---|
| Born | 7 December 1957 Oxford, United Kingdom |
| Occupations |
|
Early life
editEvans-Pritchard was born in Oxford. He was educated at Malvern College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history.[1] His father was E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University from 1946 to 1970.
Career
editFor thirty years, Evans-Pritchard has "covered world politics and economics" for the Telegraph, "based in Europe, the US, and Latin America".[2]
In the mid-1980s, he was Washington correspondent for London's Spectator and was a Central America correspondent for The Economist. In 1991, he began working at the Telegraph, where he was the newspaper's Europe correspondent in Brussels from 1999 to 2004.[2] He also served as Sunday Telegraph's Washington, D.C. bureau chief from the early 1990s until 1997.[2]
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
editEvans-Pritchard is the author of a 1997 biography of Bill Clinton, entitled The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories which was published by conservative publishing firm Regnery Publishing.[3] He originally intended to name the book The Secret History of the Clinton Conspiracy, in homage to the similarly titled exposure of the private lives of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora by the sixth-century historian Procopius, but was prevented from doing so by Regnery.[4]
In 1997 Salon called him "The Pied Piper of the Clinton Conspiracists" in a review that said Evans-Pritchard wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy theory as well as other conspiracy theories related to Clinton, including the death of Vince Foster.[5] While working as the Telegraph Washington correspondent, his reports about these issues often attracted the ire of the Clinton administration. When he left Washington, a White House aide was quoted in George saying, "That's another British invasion we're glad is over. The guy was nothing but a pain in the ass". His efforts in ferreting out the witness, Patrick Knowlton, whose last name had been spelled "Nolton" in the Park Police report on Foster's death, resulted eventually in a lawsuit by Knowlton against the FBI and the inclusion of Knowlton's lawyer's letter as an appendix to Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death.[6] In his book, Evans-Pritchard responded vigorously to White House charges against him.
Evans-Pritchard aired his dissatisfaction with press coverage of the issue while discussing the 2022 BBC Radio Four programme The Coming Storm, which analysed the circumstances surrounding the alleged conspiracy at length.[7] In a Telegraph article published shortly after the programme was aired, he jibed at its portrayal of him as a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" who wilfully nourished conspiracy theories, and condemned it for refusing to acknowledge that it was "the failure of the co-opted White House press corps and those on the FBI beat – or, in some cases, their editors – to investigate and report serial misconduct in the early 1990s that fed mistrust of establishment media, leaving the field open for talk radio and the emerging anarchy of the web". The programme's unbalanced treatment, he went on to argue, is a revealing insight into "the mental universe of the BBC, a taxpayer-funded institution accused by many of chronic ideological bias in breach of its charter."[4]
References
edit- ^ 'Cambridge Tripos results', The Guardian, 21 June 1979, p. 4.
- ^ a b c "Ambrose Evans-Pritchard". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
- ^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose (25 November 1997). The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories. Regnery Publishing. p. 460. ISBN 9780895264084. OCLC 243891962.
- ^ a b Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 'Despite what you've heard, I didn't load the gun for the Capitol Hill attack', The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2022. Archived on 6 January 2022. Retrieved 24 May 2023.
- ^ "The Pied Piper of the Clinton Conspiracists". Salon. 23 December 1997. Archived from the original on 25 November 2007. Retrieved 1 December 2007.
- ^ Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr.; Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, p. 159
- ^ The Coming Storm, Episode 1, "The Dead Body", from 16m20s, released 4 Jan 2022, accessed 25 Jan 2022