Old Elizabethan Aidan Radnedge is Chief Reporter at Metro, which last month overtook The Sun to become the UK’s biggest weekday newspaper by circulation.
Aidan (OE 1988-1995) reports on major national and international events and has worked as a war correspondent and an international undercover journalist. He has also written books on world football and about the Olympics.
He follows in the footsteps of his father, Keir Radnedge, a noted football journalist who has written for World Soccer magazine for around half-a-century and is the author of 33 books. One brother, Noel (OE 1993-2000), is an IT expert, while another, Lyndon, is a senior diplomat with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who was Deputy Head of Mission in Montenegro and is currently stationed in Nigeria.
“I have very fond memories of QE,” says Aidan, who recalls, in particular, “trips to Germany to appreciate and enrich our understanding of friendly counterparts”. He won QE prizes and commendations for Music, History and Politics and was a F orm Captain. School records show that he gained some early journalistic experience by working on the Underne House magazine.
After QE, Aidan went to Birmingham University, where he read English.
He happily recalls attending a QE Dinner Debate ten years after leaving School: “Six of us went as a gang and found former classmates surprised to find so many of us were still friends as adults – as we remain: the best of friends, a good gang.”
.jpg)
Aidan is modest about his career – “apologies to QE for squandering such good grounding and potential” – yet his newspaper has a circulation of close to 1.5 million and is also widely read online. And he routinely writes front-page leads on the biggest news stories of the day, from the death of three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, who drowned while trying to enter Europe with his family in 2015, to last year’s Brexit referendum (pictured).
“In attempts at boasting mode, I would point towards times as a foreign correspondent in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan; working undercover in crisis-ridden Zimbabwe at a time when foreign journalists were officially banned; and to working in earthquake-hit Nepal, famine-ridden Ethiopia and reporting child-soldier stories in Sierra Leone and Cambodia.”
His sports books have been for major publishers, such as Carlton Books and Dorling Kindersley.