He can’t read a clock face or do up his shoelaces. But Alastair Stewart can still remember what it was like to be one of Britain’s leading broadcasters. Andrew Billen meets him at home.
Doctors set some store by how patients “present”, although they are wary too as appearances can be deceptive. Today I shall discover how one of Britain’s most familiar news presenters currently presents. When Alastair Stewart retired from GB News a year ago, he had been presenting news bulletins for almost 50 years. As it matured over the decades, his style on ITV became unmistakable: its cigarette-charred timbre; its vigorously attacking approach to sentences. But how will he perform for me this morning, seven months after he announced that he has dementia? He knows people will be interested. Some will perhaps be voyeuristically so. Stewart’s youngest son has already joked that his greeting to me should be, “I can’t remember what we’re talking about.”
“So there is space for mirth and black humour,” says Stewart, who will soon be unerringly plucking from his mental filing cabinet the names of former colleagues, mentors, politicians, even the chief antagonists of Eighties Poland, Lech Walesa and General Jaruzelski.
“Oh, wind him up and off he goes,” says Sally, his wife of 46 years, who for fact-checking purposes is sharing a sofa with me in the sitting room of their charming farmhouse home in Stewart’s native Hampshire. They met at Southern Television where he had his first job. As a production assistant, she would sometimes tell him down his earpiece to stop talking. They have brought up three sons and a daughter. Now, in his armchair opposite, Stewart, 71 and sporting a brace of hearing aids, answers my questions brilliantly.
On the other hand, he cannot read a clock face, keep track of dates or do up his shoelaces. Sally buttons up his shirts and checks his belt is fastened.
Is that humiliating? “Yes,” he says, “it’s humiliating for me. It’s demeaning for me to have to ask a woman with whom I’ve spent my life and is the mother of my children and is my partner. She’s not my carer now, but that’s what she becomes. But if you have a dementia diagnosis, at least you get a warning of that.”
He is meeting me to promote Dementia Action Week, which began on May 13. The three representatives from the Alzheimer’s Society, although stationed in the kitchen, can hardly help but listen in, for his basso profundo is more profundo than ever. Towards the end they come in and remark how well he is doing their job for them, but he hardly needs the encouragement. He knows he is one of more than 900,000 people living with dementia in the UK and that one in three children born today will develop the condition in their lifetimes — a brutal statistic for a man whose family now includes two grandchildren, one aged two and one just eight months.
He stresses the importance of a diagnosis and getting one early. Although dementia is the UK’s biggest killer, a third of sufferers are not formally diagnosed and so fail to receive the care or support they need. If you are worried, you can match your symptoms against the Alzheimer’s Society checklist (below).
“It’s utterly vital — literally, not metaphorically — to get a diagnosis,” Stewart says. “Alzheimer’s potentially can kill. Vascular dementia, which is what I have, is less likely to kill you, but it is debilitating. And if you get a diagnosis, which I did, then a lot of things suddenly make sense. You realise why your short-term memory has gone to shot.
“The other thing about vascular dementia, as the name implies, is that for a lot of people — including me — it’s related to high blood pressure and what are called mini strokes, which pepper your brain and knock out various bits of it. Sally spotted that suddenly I couldn’t tell the time on an analogue clock any more. I just couldn’t figure out what it was telling me. So I now have a digital watch. And I couldn’t do up my shoelaces accurately. I couldn’t do my belt. That is worrying and the more you worry, the worse, potentially, it becomes.”
When those first symptoms manifested in the autumn of 2022, he devised workarounds. When he travelled to London for his weekend shows on GB News, Sally would pack his bag with the buttons done up on three shirts and three ties knotted.
“Colleagues were brilliant and very supportive but they said, ‘Look, something’s amiss. You’ve come in very early.’ Or, ‘You don’t look great. You’re a bit dishevelled,’ or whatever it might be. So in the end, I took a deep breath and went to see the GP who said, ‘Well, maybe you’re just getting older. We don’t know. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to have an MRI scan.’ And thank goodness and three cheers to the NHS, I didn’t have to wait.”
The diagnosis arrived shortly after Christmas. Did he panic? “I genuinely think it was a huge relief for me and for Sally in the sense that she’d half-guessed anyway, but we could then look each other in the eyes and say, ‘OK, we now know what the problem is and we can do certain things that will hopefully stop it getting any worse, and we know that there are people that we can talk to.’ The charities have been very, very good, and the GP is our joint pin-up.”
The first thing to tackle was the “troublingly high” blood pressure that had increased his risk of suffering the mini-strokes the MRI scan revealed. “After the life that I’ve led, it was not surprising in a sense,” he admits, meaning the 3am phone calls, breaking stories handled live on air. But the medicines he had self-prescribed for the stress were unwise. At his peak he smoked 40 cigarettes a day. Now with the help of the NHS stop-smoking clinic, prescription nicotine patches and phone counselling, he has given up and misses only the “ritual of disappearing into my study and having a cigarette”.
Alcohol had been a problem for him, but one he had tackled back in 2003 when he was convicted of drink-driving after crashing his Mercedes into a hedge and a telegraph pole near his home. Three times over the limit, he spent a night in custody and received a £3000 fine and a 23-month driving ban. His days presenting Police, Camera, Action were at an end. Heavy drinking, he says, was a habit acquired or exacerbated by his early years at ITN, which when he joined (but not for decades now) had a drinking culture. “If you turned up as a hopeful young aspirant there was a danger of thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a hard drinker if I’m going to join the top team.’
“It was an expensive lesson to learn, both in terms of one’s family and the embarrassment of being banned for drink-driving. It could have been a lot worse but it was a shot across the bows. Not happy days. But excessive drinking can contribute to the symptoms of dementia. If there are any messages to come from me, apart from the NHS doing more about diagnosis, it’s crystal clear to me now that not smoking and not drinking heavily would, on reflection, have been a better idea.”
He now does not drink at all.
In March last year, two months after his diagnosis, he announced he would be leaving his GB News show while remaining on hand for special events such as the coronation. “It wasn’t the boss calling me in and saying, ‘Look, this isn’t working any more.’ My team had become friends and they were worried. So I sat down with the chief executive, who is also a friend, and the head of news and I said, ‘I’m not giving all that I want to give with the confidence that I want to give it.’ "
In September he returned to the studio to reveal he had dementia. “People are entitled to know. In a way that’s part of the Alzheimer’s Society’s campaign for folk to get a diagnosis so their friends don’t sit there and think, ‘That’s odd. He’s not what he used to be. He’s all over the place.’ You kind of owe it to people who matter to you to be able to look them in the eye and say, ‘Actually, it’s not the end of the world, but I have vascular dementia.’”
I ask whether he is depressed by his condition. He gives an example. He is frustrated that while confident on his phone app, he cannot use his PC to access his bank account because there are so many codes to remember. “I find that depressing, but I don’t think much else other than the inability to do that sort of thing depresses me.”
Here also, he says, the NHS has a better dementia story to tell than we usually hear. As well as prescribing blood-pressure drugs and statins to reduce the risk of further mini-strokes (he does not think he has had more), his doctors found him a psychotherapist.
“She was brilliant. She said to me at one stage, ‘You need to remember how to be happy. You need to remember how to take the dogs for a walk and not only have the benefit of the walk and the oxygen and the muscular exercise but also to come back, sit down, have a cup of tea and think, ‘I really enjoyed that because I saw bees. I saw butterflies. I was with the dogs.’ She said to me that every night before she goes to sleep, she lies there and tries to think of three things that have happened that day that made her happy.”
And does he find three things to be happy about? “Most days — it’s probably unfair on them but the grandchildren feature disproportionately highly, but also having Sally and thinking how kind she’s been, doing something for me or with me. I’m incredibly lucky with her because she’s a tough cookie and a total professional. She knows the world that I grew up in because it was her world as well.”
I suggest looking back on his career must give him enormous satisfaction. “Elements of it do, certainly,” he says cautiously. The 2010 leaders’ debate he chaired with Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg — the first in British history, the “I agree with Nick” one — was his proudest moment, although he would probably also mention covering the fall of the Berlin War, his three months anchoring bulletins from the first Gulf War and handling live the Lockerbie plane bombing. He frequently won awards and in 2006 was appointed an OBE for his services to broadcasting and charity.
There were disappointments too. He was “a bit pissed off” not to succeed his mentor, Alastair Burnet, as chief anchor of News at Ten after he retired in 1991. ITN’s editor at the time, David Nicholas, had hinted he was second in line of succession after Peter Sissons, who by then had defected to the BBC. Instead the anchor’s chair went to Trevor McDonald, the focus groups’ pick. Stewart left for local news in London but returned to ITV News full-time in 2009 and anchored its 2010 election night.
His ITN story ended unhappily when in 2020 he became embroiled in a Twitter dispute with a political adviser called Martin Shapland and quoted a line from Measure for Measure (his A-level text) that included the words “angry ape”. This did not amuse Shapland, who is black, and Stewart resigned, with ITN citing multiple errors of judgment online. “It was at a time,” he says, “when social media for all sorts of people was becoming a problem. In the end we went our separate ways.”
The move to the right-wing GB News, when it launched the next year, was surprising given Stewart had been vocally in favour of enforcing broadcast impartiality. The truth is the former deputy president of the National Union of Students and friend of the future Labour cabinet ministers John Reid and Charles Clarke had moved to the right. He says it was partly due to his admiration for David Cameron’s Big Society idea. “But the Thatcherite in me also believes very strongly that there is a limit to what the state can do. Although I want the NHS to do more to support dementia diagnosis and then to support people who are diagnosed either with vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s, I also want everyone to do as much as they possibly can for all the charities involved in that world. I think if you give your working life to those charities, you’re likely to do a better job than someone who is asked to do it as a civil servant simply because that’s what’s come round on the roundabout.”
He saw Clarke, whose view on that may differ, quite recently. “I had lunch with him and at the end of it he said, ‘I don’t believe you’ve got dementia.’ "
I could easily leave with the same impression, but Alastair Stewart does have dementia, which does not mean, as he points out, he is demented. In fact, it is because so many of his faculties remain intact that the doyen of presenters is so keen to present the truth about his condition.
Alzheimer’s Society UK checklist for possible dementia symptoms
This is not intended to diagnose dementia or any other health condition. Everyone experiences dementia in their own way. This checklist includes common signs of dementia. But there can be other reasons for any changes you’ve noticed. Talk to your doctor about any concerns on this list.
Memory and ability problems
- Memory loss – difficulty learning new information or forgetting recent events or people’s names.
- Struggling to find the right word.
- Difficulty judging distances or mistaking reflections or patterns for other objects.
- Struggling to make decisions.
- Losing track of time and dates.
- Asking the same question over again.
- Putting objects in unusual places.
Problems with daily living activities
- Struggling with tasks like paying bills.
- Difficulty getting enough sleep.
- Getting lost in familiar places.
Mood and behaviour problems
- Becoming easily upset.
- Symptoms of depression.
- Symptoms of anxiety.
- Withdrawal or losing interest in things I previously enjoyed.
- Acting inappropriately or out of character.
- Feeling restless and walking about.
For more information, see the Alzheimers New Zealand website.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London