DOYLE
Andrew

• 1. Career

Andrew Doyle is a playwright, journalist, and political satirist from Northern Ireland, who has written for the fictional character Jonathan Pie and created the character Titania McGrath.

Career

Doyle regularly writes for Spiked, and runs a comedy night in London called "Comedy Unleashed". He has performed his stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, four of which have also been performed at the Soho Theatre, London. He has appeared on Sky News as a commentator, and as a panel-member on The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4. He has been a speaker at the Battle of Ideas Festival in London, an annual event hosted by the Institute of Ideas.

He was previously a visiting research fellow at Queen's University, Belfast, where he worked on the writings of Forrest Reid. Doyle originally worked as a teacher, including alongside Simon Warr at Royal Hospital School.

In April 2018 Doyle created the fictional character of Titania McGrath, initially via a parody twitter account. According to Doyle, the character was designed to mock "woke culture". The McGrath twitter account has been suspended for hate speech four times. Doyle has written two books under the guise of the character. The first was Woke: A Guide to Social Justice published 7 March 2019 and a parody of children's books, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism published September 2020. In March 2019, Doyle was contacted by Rosamund Urwin, a journalist at The Sunday Times, who asked whether he was the person behind McGrath's Twitter account, due to the inclusion of several sources in McGrath's book that he had quoted previously. Though he denied it, he later revealed himself as the man behind the account.

In February 2019, Doyle wrote a text in The Independent under the pseudonym Liam Evans. The piece expressed dismay at comedy material performed on stage. After admitting he wrote it as a hoax, Doyle claimed the newspaper had published it without sufficiently checking the writer. The Independent's executive editor said that "The suggestion that it is so outlandish that it must be false, is bizarre." Doyle also pointed out that if reading the fourth letter of every sentence in the text, it spells out "Titania McGrath wrote this you gullible hacks".

Since 2021, Doyle has hosted a weekly show titled Free Speech Nation on GB News.