Anne Alexander will be joining our Leading Women’s panel at Birkbeck, University of London as part of International Women’s Month on Saturday 23rd March.
Not long after she left the University of Reading armed with a degree in American Studies, a reporter told Anne she should become a journalist because she had a great by-line name.
Luckily, that was what Anne wanted to do, so after a stint of work experience at various local papers, she got onto the Express&Star‘s journalism training scheme near to her home town of Wednesbury in the West Midlands.
After four years – and lots of local council meetings and magistrate court hearings – she moved to London to become the deputy political editor of the newspaper based in Parliament.
She later became political editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post before jumping from press to TV three years later to become a reporter at the BBC’s Daily Politics programme.
After three and a half years reporting on Parliament in front of the camera on stories as diverse as the election of Barack Obama and education reform, she moved to the breakfast programme GMTV, now Daybreak, to be their political producer.
Highlights of her career include interviewing the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and the then Conservative Leader Michael Howard on the same day and travelling in a Prime Ministerial motorcade during Gordon Brown’s visit to the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
