Dermot Murnaghan, who has died of cancer aged 68, was one of British television’s leading news presenters during a career that embraced Channel 4, ITV and the BBC, then Sky. He had the skill of both relaying the day’s stories with authority and challenging those in power with the questions that matter.
After leaving Sky News in 2023 on completing almost 40 years in front of the camera, Murnaghan admitted to getting frustrated when he heard, from his new vantage point on a sofa at home, politicians getting off lightly in interviews. “I’m throwing soft shoes at the television screen and knocking the radio over when I hear it because that’s my obsession – I can’t give it up,” he said.
Top of his own list of political scalps was Peter Mandelson, who resigned as Labour’s trade and industry secretary in 1998 after Murnaghan pinned him down on allegations of not correctly filling in a mortgage application form two years earlier – failing to declare to the lender another, interest-free loan for the property of almost £400,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, then a shadow cabinet colleague.
Having seemingly survived grillings over the previous 24 hours on BBC Two’s Newsnight, with Jeremy Paxman, and the Today programme on Radio 4, Mandelson scored an own goal by suggesting that his session for ITV’s Lunchtime News be recorded. “This gave us the chance to do a longer interview,” explained Murnaghan, “because, quite frankly, the Lunchtime News is half-an-hour long and every minister knows that if they filibuster for three minutes you won’t lay a glove on them.”
With this extra time, Murnaghan probed deeper, asking Mandelson whether he had told anyone else about the loan from Robinson. “No,” replied Mandelson. “It was a personal arrangement made between us.” But, when asked about filling in the mortgage application form’s section about other relevant loans, the government minister appeared to contradict himself, saying: “I have acted with complete propriety.” Mandelson resigned a day later, and Murnaghan won the Royal Television Society award for best interview of 1998.
A year earlier, Murnaghan broke the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales to ITV viewers. He was the channel’s newscaster living closest to the studios when news of her car crash in Paris emerged in the early hours of Sunday 31 August 1997. Asleep in bed, he received a phone call at 1am from one of his editors: “Get here as quickly as possible. Something has happened to Princess Diana.”
In an interview on breakfast television with Christine Lampard 25 years later, Murnaghan recalled: “By the time it was confirmed that the princess had passed away, we’d been on the air for about three hours as the story had developed from a serious car accident ... reports of broken collarbones and things like that, non-life threatening.”
Then, he heard through his earpiece: “Just read the statement. Just read that statement.” Slowly, with a calm air, but also a hint of disbelief, he read off the teleprompter: “We have reports from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales, has been killed in a car accident and that her partner, Dodi Fayed, has also been killed.”
He continued on screen for 18 hours as reaction in Britain and around the world unfolded, and later said: “It felt as though I was telling a close relative that another close relative had died.”
Murnaghan was born in Barnstaple, Devon, to Wendy (nee Bush) and Vincent Murnaghan, a civil engineer. The family moved to Northern Ireland, where they lived in Armagh and the Co Down towns of Newry and Holywood, where he attended Sullivan Upper, a grammar school.
After gaining a BA and MA in history from Sussex University, Murnaghan took a postgraduate course in journalism at City University, London, and then became a trainee at the Coventry Evening Telegraph (1984-85).
Murnaghan entered television in 1985 as a researcher, then reporter, for The Business Programme on Channel 4, switching to its sister series, Business Daily, in 1987. He moved to Switzerland as a reporter and occasional anchor for the European Business Channel (1988-89) and returned to Britain for the start of the breakfast show Channel 4 Daily (1989-92) to present the Business Daily feature, then World News bulletins produced by ITN.
During 1992, he fronted weekend episodes of Channel 4 News, made by ITN, which he then joined to anchor, from 1993 to 1999, ITV’s Lunchtime News – mostly with Julia Somerville co-presenting – as well as weekend bulletins, and he featured in the channel’s Budget coverage.
When News at Ten was axed in 1999, Murnaghan became sole presenter of the new, 20-minute ITV Nightly News at 11pm. Two years later, the original programme’s reinstatement (only for three days a week at first) meant another move for him, joining Mary Nightingale as co-anchor of the ITV Evening News at 6.30pm. He also hosted ITV’s weekly current affairs series The Big Story (1993-97) and its crime appeal show Britain’s Most Wanted (1997-2001).
He presented BBC Breakfast News from 2002 to 2007, as well as BBC One’s 6pm news (2003-07) and BBC Two’s revival of the gameshow Treasure Hunt (2002-03).
In 2008, Murnaghan switched to Sky News, where he later anchored coverage of the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, and hosted his own Sunday-morning show, Murnaghan (2011-16), before settling into the Sky News Tonight evening slot (2016-23). In 2022, standing outside Buckingham Palace, he was the first broadcaster to break the news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
He signed off from Sky News for the last time with a nod to the satirical Anchorman films – about the fictional 1970s news presenter Ron Burgundy, played by Will Ferrell – by flinging his script to the studio floor behind him and telling viewers: “You stay classy, planet Earth. Goodbye.”
Murnaghan hosted the BBC quiz show Eggheads between 2003 and 2014, and the true-crime series Killer Britain (2020-25).
He won the Television & Radio Industries Club’s 2000 newscaster of the year award.
In 1989, Murnaghan married Maria Keegan, a journalist. She, their three daughters, Kitty, Molly and Alice, and son, Jack, survive him.
• Dermot John Murnaghan, news presenter, born 26 December 1957; died 11 July 2026
