Dangerous Hero Tom Bower at St Mary's Church

Tom Bower is an investigative journalist, biographer and broadcaster. In 2003 his enquiry into corruption in English football Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football won him the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. Tom is perhaps best known for his biographies of controversial figures in the world of business and media, such as Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Conrad Black and Bernie Ecclestone, although politicians have not escaped his forensic gaze, among them Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Geoffrey Robinson and now Jeremy Corbyn. Tom’s latest biography Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power was published in 2019.

Earlier on in his writing career he tackled subjects further from home, producing in 1980 the first exposé of the Allied failure after 1945 to hunt down Nazi war criminals and de-Nazify West Germany. Entitled Blind Eye to Murder, it was serialised in The Times and was the basis of a BBC TV documentary. His second book published in 1981, and positively reviewed by Neal Ascherson of The Observer, documented Klaus Barbie’s war crimes during the Second World War as head of the Gestapo in Lyons.

In the 1970s Tom worked for the BBC, first as a researcher on the programme 24 Hours, and then as a reporter and producer on Panorama. He left the BBC in 1995.