Stephen Cole

In 2012, he was appointed to the board of the Premiership Rugby Club London Welsh.

Cole runs his own firm, Cole Productions, for non-broadcasting business, and is also the chairman of the Institute of Diplomacy and Business (IoDB), the organisation he co-founded in 2011.

Cole joined Al Jazeera English on 2 December 2005, in the run-up to its launch. He is currently an anchor, based at the main broadcast-centre, in Doha in Qatar, where he was a presenter on the flagship-programme Newshour. He was also a host of studio-based discussion-programmes, such as Inside Story.

During the strike action by BBC technical staff and journalists on 23 May 2005, he was the stand-in presenter for the national BBC News coverage, which included presenting the Six O'Clock News and Ten O'Clock News bulletins on BBC One and BBC News 24. The bulletins apparently drew in more viewers than usual and resulted in his becoming known as "the Peter Pan of television".

At the BBC, Cole was a presenter of the BBC World programme Click Online from 2000 to 2005 and was a regular newsreader on BBC World News.

As well as helping launching Al Jazeera English, Cole is probably best known for being part of the launch-teams of two other leading broadcasters. One of the organisations was CNN International, in their new facility in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1989.

The other launch in which he was involved was that of Sky News. In 1989, he started his career as an anchor with the organisation, then known as BSkyB.