Tony Parsons (British journalist)

Background and personal life

Born in Romford, Essex, he was the only child of working-class parents. He lived for the first five years of his life in a rented flat above a shop in Essex, before his family moved to their own council house in Billericay, Essex.

His father was a former Royal Naval Commando who won the Distinguished Service Medal in World War Two. After the war, he worked as a lorry driver, market trader and greengrocer. His mother was a school dinner lady. Parsons attended Barstable Grammar School, Basildon (now Barstable School), which he left aged 16 with 5 O-levels. He then worked in a series of low-paid, unskilled menial jobs. He then gained employment with a city insurance company as a computer operator where his free time allowed him to develop his literary skills – publishing an underground paper called the Scandal Sheet.

Parsons married fellow NME journalist Julie Burchill. They had both answered the same advert in the paper requesting "hip, young gunslingers" to apply as new writers. He and Burchill collaborated on the book The Boy Looked at Johnny published in 1979. After the collapse of their marriage in 1984, periodic clashes in the media between Burchill and Parsons erupted for many years. Parsons became a single parent caring for their four-year-old son, Robert Kennedy Parsons. The experience of being a young man caring for a small child was to later influence his best-selling novel, Man and Boy. Parsons' father died of cancer in 1987 and his mother died of cancer in 1999, just weeks before the publication of Man and Boy. The book is dedicated to Parsons' mother.

In 1992, Parsons married his Japanese wife, Yuriko. They have one daughter, Jasmine. He lives with his wife and daughter in London.

Career

In 1974 he began work in Gordon's Gin Distillery on City Road, London, where he developed an acute gin allergy and wrote his first novel, The Kids, published by New English Library in 1976. Parsons later said that he had imagined that if he could publish a book then he would be able to make a living as a professional writer. The £700 he made from The Kids was not enough to allow him to leave Gordon's Gin factory. However, when the weekly music magazine New Musical Express advertised for new writers in the summer of 1976 Parsons submitted his novel to the editor, Nick Logan, and was rewarded with a staff writer job. For the next three years he wrote about new music. He wrote the first cover story on the Clash, and features of the Sex Pistols, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, the New York Dolls, the Buzzcocks, and Led Zeppelin among others.

For most of the 1980s, Parsons struggled to make a living as a freelance writer. His career started to recover in 1990 when he wrote Bare, an authorised biography of pop-star George Michael. Despite the absence of a written contract with the singer, proceeds from the book were split equally between the two men. However, they fell out in 1999 after an interview Michael had given to Parsons was published in the Daily Mirror. In the 1990s, Parsons became a regular on the live BBC panel show Late Review. He also made a series of authored documentaries for Channel 4. When Piers Morgan became editor of the Daily Mirror, Parsons was poached from The Daily Telegraph as a columnist.

In 1993, he presented a film for the British television documentary series Without Walls, focusing on the controversy surrounding the film A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick and distributor Warner Brothers unsuccessfully sued broadcaster Channel Four in an attempt to prevent clips from the film being shown on television. In the programme, Parsons is seen taking a cross-channel ferry from England to France to watch the film, which at the time was embargoed in Britain due to a self-imposed ban by the director.

Though it sold respectably on publication, the novel Man and Boy (1999) was a word-of-mouth success, and only reached number one in The Sunday Times best-seller list one year after publication. Despite the publication of a series of novels, Man and Boy remains his best-selling book, being published in 39 languages, including Chinese for its publication in the People's Republic of China (January 2009). Man and Boy won the British Book Awards' Book of the Year Prize in 2001.

In 2007, Parsons wrote a series of articles about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a beach in the Algarve in Portugal, in the Daily Mail. The tone with which these articles were written was later described as having a "touch of arrogant xenophobia" by The Guardian's Marcel Berlins. The Press Complaints Commission that year received 485 complaints, a huge increase in the number of complaints in comparison to previous years, his article on the McCann affair receiving the most complaints. In an article for the Daily Mirror in 2007, entitled "Oh Up Yours Senor", he said of Portugal's ambassador to Britain, Senhor António Santana Carlos, "And I would respectfully suggest that in future, if you can't say something constructive about the disappearance of little Madeleine, then you just keep your stupid, sardine-munching mouth shut".

In 2009, Parsons signed a three-book contract with HarperCollins for two further novels and a non-fiction book called, Fear of Fake Breasts. Parsons also writes a monthly column for GQ magazine and, until August 2013, a weekly column for the Daily Mirror.

Parsons has expressed in articles a strong loathing for tattoos. In the 1990s, he wrote a story called "The Tattooed Jungle", suggesting that tattoos were symptomatic of the decline of the working class. In a 2012 article for GQ magazine, Parsons lamented the fact that in the last 20 years in Britain, tattoos have become mainstream, common among both sexes and to all economic classes. Parsons wrote that tattoos "remain ugly, hideous daubings that make my flesh crawl with revulsion every time I see one".

The end of his association with the Daily Mirror came at the beginning of September 2013, with Parsons reportedly leaving the title after 18 years because of a cut in its editorial budget. Less than two weeks later it was announced that Parsons had joined The Sun on Sunday and said his previous paper was "dying" because it was giving away its content for free online.

He has been a supporter of the Conservative Party since 2015. However, he did not vote for Boris Johnson to be the Mayor of London.