Education
Peter Stanford was educated by Christian Brothers at Street Anselm"s College, Birkenhead.
Peter Stanford was educated by Christian Brothers at Street Anselm"s College, Birkenhead.
His biography of Lord Longford was the basis for the 2006 British Academy of Film and Television Arts-winning film Longford starring Jim Broadbent in the title role. A former editor of the Catholic Herald newspaper, Stanford is also director of the Longford Trust for prison reform. He read history at Merton College, Oxford.
Stanford began his journalistic career in 1983 at the Catholic weekly newspaper The Tablet.
He was the editor of The Catholic Herald from 1988 to 1992. His resignation, to concentrate on writing books, coincided with the publication of Catholics and Sex, which he co-authored with fellow journalist Kate Saunders.
They later presented a four-part television series with the same title on Channel 4. Subsequent television and radio work includes presenting The Devil: An Unauthorised Biography (BBC1, 1996) and Pope Joan (BBC1, 1998), both based on his own books
He also presented the Channel 5 series The Mission (1997) and British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 2"s Good Morning Sunday (2003 and 2004) as well as being a regular panelist on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4"s The Moral Maze (1996) and Vice or Virtue (1997).
Stanford has written for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent on Sunday and has written a monthly column in The Tablet since 2003. He is a feature writer on the Daily Telegraph. Stanford, whose mother had multiple sclerosis, was chair of Aspire, Britain’s national charity for people with spinal cord injury, from 1991 until 2001 and again from 2005 until 2012.
In 2002, he joined with family and admirers of Lord Longford to establish the Frank Longford Charitable Trust, better known as The Longford Trust, which aims to continue the peer’s commitment to prison reform via an annual lecture, and annual prize as well as awarding scholarships for young former prisoners to go to university.
He is a patron of the CandoCo Dance Company.