Vincent Hanna
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Vincent Leo Martin Hanna (9 August 1939 – 22 July 1997) was a Northern Irish television journalist famed for his coverage of United Kingdom byelections.
[edit] Background
Hanna was from a Northern Ireland Catholic background and was born in Belfast, where his father Frank was a prominent solicitor and a member of the Stormont Parliament. He married the daughter of Gerry Fitt. Hanna had a distinguished education which included Trinity College, Dublin, the Queen's University of Belfast, Harvard University and the London School of Economics. He was admitted as a Solicitor in 1964 and worked briefly for the family legal practice in industrial injuries and civil rights cases before becoming an industrial relations correspondent for The Sunday Times in 1970.
[edit] Work for the BBC
In 1973 he was recruited by the BBC Current Affairs department to work on Panorama. According to those who worked with him, he was extremely nervous when starting out, but he managed to master the medium. His greatest fame came from his BBC Newsnight coverage of by-elections from 1980 onward. His first campaign was spent doggedly pursuing candidates with difficult questions, and very few escaped unscathed. At Darlington in March 1983, Hanna's broadcasts helped to destroy the campaign of SDP candidate Tony Cook, who had been the early favourite to win.
In 1984, Hanna's impartiality came in to question when his support for tactical voting went undisguised in some reports on the Chesterfield by-election of that year. The Labour candidate, Tony Benn, accused him of acting as the SDP candidate. He publicly accused Angela Rumbold, a Conservative Minister, of being a liar. On the day of the 1987 general election, he informed the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, of the early results of the BBC exit poll that showed Labour doing surprisingly well, and hinted to Kinnock that he might find himself in government. The poll proved wholly inaccurate, and Kinnock's party lost the election.
[edit] Later career
Such was Hanna's identification with byelections that in 1987 he was a guest star in Blackadder the Third, reporting on S. Baldrick's victory at Dunny-on-the-Wold. By this time, however, Hanna had left the BBC to set up his own freelance production company which specialised in trade union issues and mainly worked for Channel 4. He also co-presented A Week in Politics for the channel from 1989 until his death. He was an active Radio broadcaster on BBC Radio Five Live from 1994 where he managed to achieve an audience despite his show going out from midnight to 2 AM. From 1996 he presented Medium Wave on BBC Radio 4. His media company gave public relations advice to several local authorities on presentation. Hanna also made a successful appearance on Have I Got News For You.
Hanna was an active Trade Unionist in the National Union of Journalists. He led a strike at the BBC in 1985 when the Governors, bowing to Government pressure, suppressed a documentary called Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union which covered the home life of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionist Party.
He was a pioneer of online communications in journalism, being a regular contributor to Compuserve's UKPOLItics forum from the early 1990s.
Hanna died in 1997 of a stroke
