Anthony Michell Howard (born February 12, 1934) is a prominent British journalist, broadcaster and writer. He was formerly editor of the New Statesman and deputy editor of The Observer.

Life and career
The son of a Church of England clergyman Canon Guy Howard, he was educated at Highgate School and Westminster School and Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he was chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club in 1954 and President of the Oxford Union the following year.
Howard had planned on a career as a barrister, having been called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1956 while fulfilling his National Service obligations in the army, during which he saw active service in the Suez War, but he "stumbled" in to his career as a journalist in 1958, starting on Reynolds News as a political correspondent. Howard moved to the Manchester Guardian in 1959. The year after, he was awarded a Harkness scholarship to study in the United States, though he remained on the Guardian's staff.
He was political correspondent of the New Statesman from 1961 until 1964. In January 1965 Howard joined the Sunday Times as its Whitehall correspondent, which turned out to be an unfortunate career move, as it was a post in advance of accepted practices at the time.[1] He was then appointed the Observer's chief Washington correspondent (1966-69), later contributing a political column (1971-72).
As editor of the New Statesman (1972-78), succeeding Richard Crossman, whose deputy he had been (1970-72), he appointed Robin Cook as the magazine's parliamentary adviser in 1974,[2] (Cook also contributed articles), James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis as literary editor in 1977. Under Howard, the magazine published a rare non-British contributor: Gabriel García Márquez in March 1974, on the overthrow of Salvador Allende's elected government in Chile the previous September. Perhaps out of a sense of mischief, he featured a series of diatribes against the British Left, by the journalist and historian Paul Johnson, a drinking companion and friend, whose rightward drift was well advanced by then. Howard was unable to halt the magazine's fall in circulation, however. He then edited The Listener for two years (1979-81).
Howard was deputy editor of The Observer (1981-88), where one of his journalist protégés was the journalist and (later novelist) Robert Harris, whom he appointed as the newspaper's political editor. His professional relationship with the then editor, Donald Trelford, ultimately broke down over allegations that Trelford had allowed the newspaper's then proprietor Tiny Rowland to interfere in editorial content. After leaving The Observer, following an ill-fated editorial coup against Trelford, he was a reporter on Newsnight and Panorama (1989-92), having previously presented Channel Four's Face the Press (1982-85). His last editorial positions before turning freelance were at The Times as Obituaries editor (1993-99) and Chief Political Book Reviewer (1990-2004), though he contributed opinion columns to the newspaper until September 2005, when his regular column was discontinued.
Howard assisted Michael Heseltine on his memoirs, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (2000), and more recently published an official biography Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal (2005), despite being a self-confessed agnostic.
A convivial and avuncular man, he is regularly interviewed on radio and television, as his long career enables him to present contemporary events in a longer perspective than most other commentators can attain. Anthony Howard married Carol Anne Gaynor in 1965 and was awarded the CBE in 1997. He lives in London and Ludlow, Shropshire.