Alex Mitchell

Recent Speaker

November 21, 2011

11.30am - 1.30pm

Come the Revolution: A memoir

Journalist Alex Mitchell’s memoir, Come the Revolution, offers an insider’s account of media and politics that is compelling, exciting and rich with insights.

Starting as a cadet reporter in Queensland, Mitchell joined Rupert Murdoch’s tearaway tabloid, the Daily Mirror, in Sydney and Canberra when the circulation war with the rival Sun was at its fiercest. He travelled to Fleet Street in the mid-1960s and joined the London Sunday Times, taking part in the Insight team’s investigations into Soviet double agent Kim Philby, rogue publisher Robert Maxwell and international offshore funds swindler Bernie Cornfeld.

He joined Granada Television’s current affairs program, World in Action, becoming the first Western reporter to interview Uganda’s President Idi Amin after his bloody military coup in January 1971.
Following his political convictions, Mitchell quit mainstream journalism to become editor of Britain’s first Trotskyist daily newspaper. He and fellow Workers Revolutionary Party leader, Oscar-winning actor Vanessa Redgrave, travelled the Middle East showing the documentary film, The Palestinian, and meeting Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Mitchell returned to Australia in 1986 following the collapse of the Trotskyist movement amid a headline-grabbing sex and financial scandal. He rejoined mainstream journalism and made a new career becoming state political editor for Sydney’s Sun-Herald with a popular weekly column. From 2001 until 2007, when he left Fairfax to start a freelance writing career, he was president of the NSW Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Mitchell writes that Rupert Murdoch’s early role as a newspaper proprietor was attractively exhilarating but as the empire expanded in the UK and the US it became mired in reactionary politics, ruthless power and greed.

Come the Revolution lays bare Mitchell’s life and loves, his past and politics, with the flair of a born storyteller unafraid to ask hard questions about the world, and himself.