Caroline is Executive Director of the English National Ballet and Chair of Digital UK. She began at the BBC as a broadcast journalist and worked as a producer on Radio 4 and Panorama. She spent 11 years at Channel 4 before returning to the BBC, where she became Chief Operating Officer, before stepping down in 2012.
Gillian is an award winning South African novelist, playwright and memoirist. Her 1997 memoir Every Secret Thing, about her parents’ struggles against apartheid, brought her international acclaim. Ice Road (2004) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel is Black Orchids (2008).
Claire is the Books Editor of the Guardian and the Observer. She was formerly theatre critic for the Ham & High, The Financial Times, and the Guardian, where she also worked as arts editor. She also presents the Guardian’s weekly books podcast and is a frequent commentator on radio.
Richard is Professor of Journalism and Director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University. He spent 30 years as a journalist at the BBC, where he worked as a producer, editor, and manager. He is also Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Anushka is Sky News’ Political Correspondent based in London. She began her journalism career at the Observer and spent eight years there, covering the 2010 General Election as the paper’s policy editor. She also worked as a columnist and chief political correspondent for The Times.
Richard Tait is Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University. He was Editor-in-Chief of ITN from 1995 to 2002. Before that he was Editor of Channel Four News and Editor of Channel 4 Programmes from 1987 to 1995. He began his journalistic career in business magazines before joining the BBC in 1979 where he became editor of The Money Programme, Newsnight, and the 1987 General Election Results programme. He was a Governor of the BBC from 2004 to 2006 and a BBC Trustee and Chairman of the Editorial Standards Committee from 2006 to 2010. He was awarded the RTS’s lifetime achievement award in 2014 for his work at the BBC and ITN. He is Treasurer of the International News Safety Institute and an independent trustee of the Disasters Emergency Committee.
John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the Financial Times, a columnist for Reuters.com and for La Repubblica of Rome; he was co-founder of The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in 2006, where he is now a Senior Research Fellow. He has been editor of the New Statesman and of Time Out. John has won the British Press Awards Specialist Writer of the Year; the Granada What the Papers Say awards Journalist of the Year; the David Watt prize for journalism and the Biagio Agnes (Italy) International Reporter of the Year . He is the author of Loss without Limit: the British Miners’ Strike, Rebirth of a Nation: An Anatomy of Russia, What the Media are doing to our Politics and Reporting the EU, News, Media and the European Institutions.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill is the Provost of Eton College. He is Chairman of Coutts. He is a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard, 1969-70. He was M.P. for Bristol West between 1979 and 1997 and a Minister from 1981, serving in the Cabinet between 1990 and ’97. He is a director of a number of companies. He is Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, former Chairman of the Science Museum, the Rhodes Trust, a founder trustee of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in South Africa and a trustee of Cumberland Lodge.
Frances Cairncross is an economist and journalist. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, chair of the Court of Heriot-Watt University and interim Director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. She was an economic columnist on The Guardian and subsequently a senior editor at The Economist. Dame Frances was Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council between 2001 and 2007. She is the author of a number of books, including The Death of Distance and Costing the Earth. From 2004 to 2014 Dame Frances was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford University
Fiammetta Rocco grew up in Kenya of French-Italian parents and read Arabic at Oxford. An award-winning journalist on both sides of the Atlantic, she has been the books and arts editor of The Economist since 2003. Her book, The Miraculous Fever Tree, about malaria and the discovery of quinine, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week. She is also the administrator of the Man Booker International Prize and on the board of the Edinburgh International Book festival.
David Goodhart is a journalist, commentator and author and former director of the think tank Demos. He founded Prospect magazine in 1995, and was its editor until 2010. He is now editor-at-large. He is the author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration and has written for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Independent and The Times.
Andrew Gamble is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. He was an editor of The Political Quarterly 1997-2012. His main research interests lie in political economy, British politics, political theory and political history. His books includePolitics and Fate and Crisis without end? The unravelling of western prosperity. In 2005 he received the Isaiah Berlin Prize from the Political Studies Association for lifetime contribution to political studies. His most recent book, to be published next year by Polity is ‘Can the welfare state survive?’.
Julia Unwin has been Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust since 2007. She was a member of the Housing Corporation Board for 10 years and a Charity Commissioner from 1998-2003. Julia was also Deputy Chair of the Food Standards Agency and worked as an independent consultant operating within government and the voluntary and corporate sectors. She has researched and written extensively on the role, governance and funding of the voluntary sector, and its relationship with government. She previously held a position as chair of the Refugee Council from 1995 until 1998, and is currently a member of the University of York’s Council and a Governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Julia was awarded a Fellowship of the City and Guilds of London Institute in June 2012. She has Honorary Doctorates from the University of South Wales and from York St John University. Julia has written several books, the most recent of which is entitled “Why Fight Poverty?” and was published in November 2013. Follow Julia on Twitter @juliaunwin
Nick is a Senior Fellow at The King’s Fund, where he works on a range of policy projects. Between 1996 and 2011, he was Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times. He is also the author of The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State.
Emily Ashton is senior political correspondent at BuzzFeed UK, where she has worked since January (2015). Before this, she was Whitehall correspondent at The Sun for three and a half years. She started her journalism career as a reporter at the Press Association where she worked in general news before moving to Westminster and becoming chief parliamentary r
Stewart is a Professor of TV Journalism at City University. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief and CEO of ITN News. He was made a CBE in 2000 for his services to broadcast journalism.
Yasmin is a journalist, author, and a columnist for the Independent and the Evening Standard. She has over 30 years’ experience in journalism and has written for a number of newspapers, including The Guardian, The New York Times, and the Daily Mail. Yasmin won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2002.
Tony is a Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at UCL, Professorial Fellow in Politics at Birkbeck, and the joint editor of Political Quarterly. He is a former Labour MP, and the author of numerous books, including British Politics: A Very Short Introduction.