PERSON: Tom Bower

Writer, Biograher

Thomas Michael Bower (born 28 September 1946) is a British writer known for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorised biographies, often of business tycoons and newspaper proprietors.

His books include unauthorised biographies of Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Conrad Black, Richard Branson, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. A book about Richard Desmond remains unpublished. His book, Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football, won the 2003 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Bower was born in London in 1946. His parents were Jewish refugees who fled Prague after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and arrived in London later that same year. They married in London in early 1943. From 1948, Tom’s father Jiri Gerhard Bauer renounced the use of the surname Bauer for the family, and called himself George Gerald Bower, a change he confirmed by deed poll on 15 May 1957.

After attending the William Ellis School in Hampstead, Bower studied law at the London School of Economics, before working as a barrister for the National Council of Civil Liberties. Bower says that during this period he was a Marxist, being nicknamed “Tommy the Red”.

In 1970, Bower joined the BBC as a researcher on the programme 24 Hours before becoming a reporter on Panorama. He was a producer on Panorama from 1975 until 1987. He left the BBC in 1995. Bower is married to Veronica Wadley, Baroness Fleet, former editor of the London Evening Standard, and has four children. They live in London.