Thomas Zoltan Newton Dunn, known as Tom Newton Dunn, is an English broadcast journalist and former newspaper journalist. Since 2020 he has been chief political commentator at Times Radio, and co-presents the station's Sunday morning politics programme "G&T" with Gloria de Piero. He was the political editor of The Sun from 2009 to 2020, having previously worked for ten years as a defence journalist and foreign reporter. Before joining Times Radio, Newton Dunn regularly appeared on the BBC and Sky News, and was one of the hosts of BBC Radio 4's Week in Westminster. He also appeared on the now-defunct What the Papers Say.
Newton Dunn joined The Daily Telegraph as a diary reporter for the Peterborough column in 1996, moving to the Daily Mirror to join its graduate trainee scheme the following year. He spent several years with the Mirror as a news reporter, before being made the paper's defence correspondent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and covering the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. In 2004, he moved to The Sun as the paper's defence editor. He was promoted to the role of political editor there in 2009, although it was intended for him to remain involved in the title's defence coverage. He is also a regular broadcast commentator on politics, is a regular panel member of BBC Two's Sunday Politics programme, hosts BBC Radio 4's The Week in Westminster, has been a panellist on Any Questions?, and reviews the papers on Sky News. Before the programme's demise he sometimes hosted What the Papers Say. Newton Dunn left The Sun to become a presenter and chief political commentator at the newly-formed Times Radio in summer 2020. He was replaced as political editor by Harry Cole.
Awards
Newton Dunn won the Scoop of the Year award at the 2008 British Press Awards for revealing the cockpit tapes behind the Matty Hull friendly fire incident. He also won Reporter of the Year for that and other defence stories, and collected Campaign of the Year and the Hugh Cudlipp Award for Popular Journalism on behalf of The Sun for the paper's Help For Heroes campaign. He also won Scoop of the Year for the Matty Hull friendly fire incident story at the 2007 What The Papers Say Awards. In 2015, he won the Politics Journalism award at the annual British Journalism Awards for revealing the Plebgate scandal, which was successfully defended from a libel suit brought by Conservative MP and former Government Chief WhipAndrew Mitchell. He was threatened with arrest by the police if he didn't reveal his sources for Plebgate and did not do so.
Far-right conspiracy incident
In December 2019, Newton Dunn wrote an article for The Sun titled HIJACKED LABOUR, in which he reported that former British intelligence officers had produced a chart alleging that "Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists". It later emerged that the ultimate sources for these claims included the antisemitic, far-right websites Aryan Unity and the Millennium Report, the latter described by Vice as "an antisemitic conspiracy site known for publishing articles with titles like, 'The Jewish Hand in World Wars'". The 'HIJACKED LABOUR' thesis was described as a "far-right conspiracy theory" by Daniel Trilling in The Guardian. The left-wing magazines Tribune and Jacobin argued that such articles were a danger to journalists and those on the political left, with Jacobin calling the chart a "hit list". Newton Dunn's article was deleted on the same day of its publication, without comment from him or his newspaper. The Independent Press Standards Organisation subsequently confirmed to The Guardian that it had received a complaint concerning the piece, and Peter Geoghegan of openDemocracy expressed his strong concern at his organisation being named as part of this alleged network.
Publications
Newton Dunn has ghost-written two non-fiction books by military veterans:
