Alastair Stewart details struggle with dementia

Alastair Stewart has detailed his ongoing struggle with dementia after being diagnosed with the disease two months ago.

The former ITV and GB News broadcaster said he was diagnosed earlier this year after he was beginning to feel "discombobulated" and forgetting tasks such as his work call time and making spelling mistakes.

Read more: Alastair Stewart returns to GB News after accident and says the 'world has gone bonkers'

Speaking to Saga magazine, Stewart explained what it was like living with the condition and the specific challenges he was facing such as how he was struggling to identify shapes.

He wrote: "We sit at the kitchen table and do spot-the-odd-one-out exercises, word searches and – the thing I find most difficult – looking at a jumble of shapes on a page, then trying to reproduce them in a drawing on the following page."

Stewart also spoke of his wife's new role as a carer: "It is demeaning and soul-destroying, and she comes to it from a position of enormous calibre and talent."

Stewart's wife was also the one to first realise something was wrong: "She asked me to reset our kitchen clock and I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t conceptualise what the hands signified, and I could no longer glance up and say it was ten past 11."

Stewart worked at ITV for 40 years and became the longest-serving male newsreader in British TV. He left the channel in 2020 after an online controversy in which he called a Black man an "angry ape" using a quote from Shakespeare.

After stepping down from the network, he was announced as one of the GB News' first presenters where he would host Alastair Stewart & Friends.

The show ran until March 2023 after which he announced his retirement after admitting the "rigours" of live broadcasting had become too much for him. He was since made guest appearances on the channel and revealed his dementia diagnosis on air.