Background
Lloyd was born and raised in Anstruther, Fife, by his grandparents and mother, a beautician.
Lloyd was born and raised in Anstruther, Fife, by his grandparents and mother, a beautician.
Lloyd became a freelance journalist in 1996, and worked as a columnist for The Times from 1997 to 1998 and a contributor to the New Statesman until 2003. In 2006 he co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He is director of the Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy.
His books include Loss without Limit: the British Miners" Strike (with Martin Adeney,1985).
Rebirth of a Nation: an Anatomy of Russia (1998), What the Media are doing to our Politics (2004), and Reporting the European Union: News, Media and the European Institutions (with Cristina Marconi, 2014). He then became a supporter of the Labour Party.
Lloyd also supported the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, believing Trimble could help bring peace to Northern Ireland. A strong supporter of the Blair government, he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as the Cameron ministry"s 2011 military intervention in Libya.
In August 2014, he was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September"s referendum on that issue.
He is a member of the editorial board of Prospect, the advisory board of the Moscow School of Political Studies, and is a columnist for Louisiana Repubblica of Rome. In the 1970s, Lloyd was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and later the British and Irish Communist Organisation. In the 1990s, Lloyd was one of several prominent members of Common Voice, a British group that advocated voting reform.