Neil Oliver: The man I knew – and the man he became

Earlier this month I read a harrowing account of Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway’s struggle to care for her husband, Derek Draper, whose life has been devastated by Covid.

The former Labour strategist was a healthy 52-year-old until his body was ravaged by the virus in 2020. His kidneys failed, his liver was damaged, his lungs seized up and he developed holes in his heart.

After spending a year in hospital, he was finally able to return home, but he remains bedbound and utterly dependent on his wife and the couple’s two children. He is doubly incontinent and, on the same day she was interviewed, Kate washed nine bags of soiled laundry.

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Shortly afterwards, I read a news article about how Neil Oliver – the former TV historian-turned-public-polemicist – had stepped down as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

His ‘resignation’ followed a telephone discussion with senior members, about whether some of his public statements on science were compatible with the aims and values of the Society.

As well as questioning whether human activity is to blame for climate change, Neil has also delivered a series of monologues on his GB News show, railing against the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic, questioning successive lockdowns and the vaccine roll-out, which he condemned as an infringement of people’s liberty.

In one, he said he would ‘cheerfully’ catch Covid if it meant safeguarding his freedom. "If your freedom means I might catch Covid from you, then so be it. If my freedom means you might catch Covid from me, then so be it. That's honestly how I see it," he said. He has also described the first lockdown as "the biggest mistake in world history".

Apart from the shocking juxtaposition of the two articles, reading them had a personal resonance for me because there was a time when Neil and I were close friends, as close as brothers.

We were part of a trio of trainee journalists working on rival newspapers in Dumfries in the early 1990s, and we immediately clicked. The other member of our triumvirate had been at school with Neil, and he remains one of my closest friends, while neither of us has spoken with Neil in more than 20 years.

In the absence of wild nightlife, we made our own fun, whiling away the hours in local bars, swapping anecdotes and jokes.

During our 10-year friendship, Neil and I shared a flat, went on holiday together, he was an usher at my wedding, and he held my eldest daughter at her baptism.

He was intelligent, curious, funny, irreverent, and self-deprecating – seemingly the antithesis of the grizzled bloviator who now often pops up, occasionally on my social media feeds, showering the airwaves with his views and wild theories.

Neil Oliver found fame on Coast (Image: free)

As well as questioning mainstream science, Neil has campaigned for Reform UK, a populist, right-wing party founded with support from Nigel Farage.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism took issue with one of his trademark GB News monologues, in which he referred to a "silent war" by politicians, whom he accused of seeking to take "total control of the people" and impose a "one-world government".

He has denied that there is a human-made climate crisis, accusing the BBC and other news organisations of politicising weather reports. During the summer, when much of Europe was experiencing record heat, he wrongly accused the corporation of changing its basis for measuring temperatures, which he described as “among the most blatant and inexcusable fearmongering”.

My 20-year-old son, who shares my moderate, left-of-centre views, has asked me more than once, ‘how could you have been friends with this guy?’. I told him that he wasn’t always like this, but now I’m starting to wonder if that’s true.

I lost touch with Neil a long time ago but, what I have seen of him recently has made me question how we view the past, the reliability of memory as well as the nature of friendship.

Did he always hold these attitudes? Was I and the friends we shared just not listening keenly enough, or did we fail to ask the right questions? Perhaps most pertinently, if I had known then what I know now about him, could we ever have been friends?

To the uninitiated, Neil Oliver is a former presenter of the successful BBC series Coast and other history-based TV shows. One of Reform UK’s policies is to abolish the BBC.

We met shortly after he graduated with a degree in archaeology, and he was working as a freelance digger. Fed up with the itinerant lifestyle and low pay, he took a job as a trainee reporter on his hometown’s local newspaper.

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While our careers took us in different directions, we both ended up in Edinburgh where we shared a flat. I introduced him to a group of my friends, and we moved around in a crowd, gathering weekly in the bar of the Point Hotel, in Tollcross, where we engaged in lengthy drinking sessions.

Neil always stood slightly apart. Many of us were journalists or worked in politics, and he had no interest in either. Memorably, we discussed what we wouldn’t be prepared to do to land a big story – break the law, lie to a trusted contact, that sort of thing. Neil’s response was "cross the road".

Nor was he interested in other young men’s interests, like sport or music. He disdained our obsession with football, and he cheerfully boasted that he couldn’t remember the last time he had "broken into a trot".

He wasn’t even interested in modern history. He had studied archaeology, he said, because he found discovering evidence of flint chips left by a hunter gatherer sharpening a spear thousands of years ago more fascinating than decisions made by politicians and army generals. This was the closest I ever came to hearing him expound a personal philosophy – as far as I could tell, he had no strongly-held political convictions.

His main contribution to social gatherings was as a skilful storyteller and recounter of anecdotes. He was master of the factoid, usually single takeaways from books he had read, which he found particularly fascinating.

One such factoid was a claim, by writer Davis Miller in his book The Tao of Muhammad Ali, that when Ali fought Brian London at Earls Court Arena in 1966, he unleashed a volley of 17 punches with such speed that he held London up, even after he had knocked him out.

The scientific basis for this claim was never explained but it was enough for Neil to recount it time and again. More than 20 years later, he was still repeating it, in his column for a Sunday newspaper.

Neil Oliver on GB News (Image: free)

He liked to be thought of as well read. His flats were always populated with spatchcocked literary novels, splayed across surfaces in every room, even the bathroom, which served as a message to visitors that he always had several books on the go at any time.

He told the wife of a friend that he often spent his free time in bookshops, and that he could read an entire novel standing at the bookshelf from which he had plucked it, before returning it, without the need to buy it.

Neil was a collector rather than an innovator or a protagonist – he collected quotes, phrases, anecdotes, experiences and even people before discarding them, and moving on.

He could make you laugh but his wit could seem derivative, and his quips often turned out to have been borrowed. He told my then future wife and I in a pub that, when he was at school, his mother had written a note for his PE teacher, urging him to excuse Neil from games because he was "suffering from existential angst".

While it was implicit the story was not true, he did nothing to disabuse us of the notion that the joke was his own. When I later heard the same line uttered in a Woody Allen film, it didn’t matter, it was still a funny line. His lack of interest in politics was a subject that he rehearsed time and again. He could become angry at perceived injustices, usually things that affected him directly but, for the life of me, I can’t remember anything specific.

What I do remember is that his suggested solutions to such injustices were usually so outlandish that I always thought he must be joking.

His big break came when he was spotted by an independent television producer who thought he had the right look for a new TV series they were planning, to popularise the subject of archaeology.

From there he went on to have a successful career presenting a succession of middlebrow, history-for-the-masses programmes where re-enacted scenes featuring people in period costume were intercut with his earnest commentaries. The trappings of celebrity followed – overseas travel, red carpet appearances, he became the narrator on Glasgow tourist buses, and he could always be counted on to pack Pitlochry Festival Theatre on a wet Wednesday in January.

He brought a jojoba and coconut freshness to the cobwebbed world of history programming – no mention of Neil could pass without reference to his sheenful locks – but his lack of specialist knowledge brought him into conflict with the academic establishment.

When the BBC commissioned a landmark history of Scotland series, why had they chosen a TV presenter rather than an historian to write and front it, wondered the eminent historian Professor Sir Tom Devine?

The first time I heard Neil’s anger voiced publicly was during the 2014 independence referendum campaign when he described Alex Salmond as a "wrecking ball of a man". It was also the first time I recall him ever taking a political stand on anything and I feared for the consequences.

His pronouncements became more frequent and more extreme during lockdown – by then, I suspect, the TV work had dried up and he had become accustomed to the exposure. It looked like he was attention-seeking.

But with them came the social media backlash – enraged, personal and hurtful invective that the person I knew back then would have found hard to handle.

The common reaction among the Point Hotel alumni was that of shock. When two or more of us gather in the same place we always ask the same question: "Why would Neil have traded a seemingly gilded career as an engaging pop historian for another as a fulminating aunt sally whose success will always only be as good as his next bonkers tirade?"

Though I’m sure he will never have given the matter much thought, his opinions affect me as they do everyone else. His TV slot on a Saturday evening may only attract a handful of diehards, but the social media reaction to his opinions reaches a far wider audience.

My wife works in the NHS and, during successive lockdowns, she and her colleagues risked their health by turning up for work every day. Like most people, I fear for the future of the planet and for the world in which our children will grow up.

One of his favourite quotes was the opening line to The Go-Between by LP Hartley, a copy of which he kept in his bathroom. ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.

The more I think about it the more I wonder whether this is true, at least in how it applies to my memories of Neil. Did he really do things differently then or has he always been the same person?

If the latter is the case, then I will be the first to admit that I misjudged him.