Speakers

Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister on 25 October 2022.

He was previously appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer from 13 February 2020 to 5 July 2022. He was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 24 July 2019 to 13 February 2020, and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government from 9 January 2018 to 24 July 2019.

He was elected Conservative MP for Richmond (Yorks) in May 2015 and served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from June 2017 until his ministerial appointment.

The Rt Hon Lucy Frazer KC MP was appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on 7 February 2023.

She was previously Minister of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities from 26 October 2022 to 7 February 2023.

She was previously Minister of State at the Department for Transport from 7 September to 26 October 2022.

She was Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 16 September 2021 to 7 September 2022.

Lucy was Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice from 10 September 2021 to 16 September 2021 and from 25 July 2019 to 2 March 2021. She previously served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice from 9 January 2018 to 9 May 2019.

She was Solicitor General from 2 March 2021 to 10 September 2021 and from 9 May 2019 to 25 July 2019.

Rushdi Abu Alouf is the Gaza Correspondent for the BBC having joined the Corporation in 2002. He embarked on his career as a journalist in 1998, starting as a volunteer at the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds before moving to work in visual journalism and on a local production company. 

Throughout his career, Rushdi has covered many historical events, including Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, the siege and passing of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas’ victory in the parliamentary elections, internal Palestinian conflicts or the mini civil war, and the series of wars between Hamas and Israel in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and the recent conflict that erupted following Hamas’ attacks on October 7th.

 Kamal Ahmed is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The News Movement, a new media business focused on social media channels, new audiences and digital consumption.

Between 2018 and 2021, Kamal was Editorial Director of BBC News, working across news strategy, daily news and planning, commissioning, analysis, visual and audio journalism and new forms of digital content. He was a member of the Newsgroup Board and the Sounds board. 

Between 2016 and 2018 Kamal was Economics Editor at BBC News, leading economics coverage for the corporation. He joined the BBC in April 2014 as Business Editor from the Telegraph Media Group where he was Executive Business Editor responsible for The Sunday Telegraph’s business and economics coverage.

Between 2007 and 2009 Kamal was Group Director, Communications, at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and before that was Executive Editor, News, at The Observer. Between 2000 and 2004, Kamal was Political Editor of The Observer, covering Tony Blair’s premiership. He has also worked at The Guardian and Scotland on Sunday.

A Leeds University Graduate in Political Studies, Kamal’s first book, The Life and Times of a Very British Man, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018.

Ros Atkins is the BBC News Analysis Editor and has been a BBC News presenter for twenty years. He’s the co-presenter of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 and the author of The Art of Explanation which came out last year. 

Charlie Beckett is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications. He is the founding director of Polis, the London School of Economics’ international journalism think-tank. Professor Beckett is currently leading the Polis Journalism and AI project. He was director of the LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission that reported on the misinformation crisis in 2018. Before joining the LSE in 2006 he was an award-winning journalist at LWT, BBC and ITN. 

Jack Blanchard is the UK Editor for POLITICO.

In this role, Blanchard oversees the output from POLITICO’s London newsroom whilst also working alongside the publication’s editors in Europe and the United States.

Blanchard also contributes to POLITICO’s podcasts, including co-hosting Politics at Jack and Sam’s alongside Sam Coates from Sky News and Westminster Insider.

He was the inaugural author of POLITICO’s London Playbook newsletter in 2017 and subsequently spent two years as UK Political Editor where he also launched the Westminster Insider podcast.

Prior to joining POLITICO, Blanchard was Political Editor of the Daily Mirror, where he covered two General Elections and the referendums on Brexit and Scottish Independence.

Before his arrival in Parliament in 2012, Blanchard spent seven years working for local and regional newspapers, including as Political Editor of the Yorkshire Post.

Maria Breslin became the first woman editor in the Liverpool Echo’s history in July 2020. Maria started her career on the Reporter weekly newspaper group in Greater Manchester before moving to the Press Association’s Northern Bureau covering Merseyside, Cheshire and North Wales. She joined Reach (then Trinity Mirror) as news editor for the North Wales Daily Post before being appointed head of content at the Liverpool Echo. She went on to become digital editor spearheading the transformation to a digital-first newsroom. She is an NCTJ industry adviser to City of Liverpool College and a member of the NCTJ’s accreditation board. She is also a member of the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee.

Rebecca is the Chair of the Crime Reporters Association (CRA), a group of specialist journalists covering crime and policing across print, broadcast and new media. She first joined the CRA 15 years ago and was elected Chair in 2019, becoming the first woman to lead the organisation since its inception in 1945. The award-winning journalist joined the Daily Mail 18 years ago as a general news reporter and moved onto the crime desk in 2010. In 2020 she became Crime and Security Editor, the first woman in the paper’s history to hold that role.

The Lady Chief Justice is the most senior judge in England and Wales and is responsible for the administration of justice. Dame Sue Carr was sworn in as the first Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales on the 1st October 2023. Dame Sue Carr was called to the Bar in 1987 and, as a barrister, she specialised in general commercial law and took silk in 2003. She became Chair of the Professional Negligence Bar Association in 2007, Chair of the Bar Standards Board Conduct Committee in 2008, and was appointed as the Complaints Commissioner to the International Criminal Court in the Hague in 2011.

Her judicial career began in 2009 in crime, when she became a Recorder. She was appointed to the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division in 2013, and became a nominated Judge of the Commercial Court and the Technology and Construction Court in 2014. In the same year she became a member of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal until 2016. She became a Presider of the Midland Circuit in 2016 until 2020, when she was appointed as a Lady Justice of Appeal. In the same year she was also appointed as the senior Judicial Commissioner and Vice Chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission, a position she held until January 2023.

Tessa Chapman has been Chief Correspondent for 5 News since 2011, reporting at home and abroad for the channel.  She also regularly presents the network’s flagship news show at 5pm.

Shortlisted for ‘Journalist of the Year’ by the Society of Editors in 2022 and 2023, Tessa’s work includes award-winning investigations into eating disorders and the taboo subject of child to parent abuse, and long-form reports into social issues including drug rehabilitation, gambling and children in care.

Tessa has been at the heart of the biggest stories in recent years, reporting from Kyiv as Russia invaded Ukraine, from Turkey in the aftermath of the earthquake and presenting live from the studio to break the news of the Queen’s death to viewers.  She has covered conflicts in Gaza and Libya, refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe, shooting tragedies and the gun rights debate in the US and climate issues in Africa and Iceland.

Before her current role, Tessa was North of England Correspondent for Sky News.  Her first job in television was as a reporter for ITV Granada.  She started her career in local commercial radio in Manchester, where a roster issue meant she was sent to interview the Prime Minister Tony Blair on her first day.

Pete Clifton has been the Editor-in-Chief at PA Media since 2015. He began his career as a news reporter and cricket correspondent at the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, and has also worked at the Extel sports agency, the BBC and Microsoft’s MSN. His time at the BBC included being Editor of Ceefax, Editor of the BBC News website and launch Editor of the BBC Sport website. Away from work he enjoys his family, cycling, golf, playing the piano and good bars.

Alex is Special Correspondent for Sky News and during her 30 year career has been arrested, detained, abducted, interrogated and faced live bullets, tear-gas, IEDs, and mortar shells.

Based in Istanbul, she reports on major stories around the world. Formerly based in Dubai, Delhi and Johannesburg, Alex has covered events in Africa, South Asia, the Gulf and the Middle East including covering the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria.

Alex was the first correspondent to independently access Myanmar’s Rakhine State and to get first-hand evidence of what the UN called ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Rohingya.

She was the first reporter to broadcast live from Tripoli’s Green Square as rebel forces took over the Libyan capital.

Alex has won numerous prestigious awards including five International Emmys, four BAFTAs and is an unprecedented five-time winner of the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year award. She won Broadcast Journalist of the Year at the inaugural Society of Editors’ Media Freedom awards in 2022 and was nominated for the award again the following year, along with also receiving a nomination for Foreign Correspondent of the Year.

Pippa has covered Westminster and international politics for more than two decades, reporting on six general elections, seven prime ministers and too many major news stories to mention, from the Iraq war and the financial crash to Brexit and parliamentary scandals.

She is Political Editor of The Guardian – where she has held the Truss and Sunak governments to account and covered the transformation of the Labour party – and previously held the same role at the Daily Mirror where she exposed the Partygate and Barnard Castle scandals. Before that she covered politics at the London Evening Standard.

A regular on broadcast media including Sky News and the BBC, where she is a presenter of Radio 4’s The Week In Westminster, she is a multi-award winning journalist who is currently the Society of Editors’ political journalist of the year.

Jody Doherty-Cove, Head of Editorial AI at Newsquest, leads a growing team of ‘AI-assisted’ journalists and helps oversee the safe integration of the technology within the company’s 150+ local titles in the UK. 

Kate Ferguson is the Political Editor of the Sun on Sunday – becoming the first ever female political editor at any of The Sun titles.

She is in charge of all of The Sun on Sunday’s political coverage; breaking exclusives, interviewing the biggest names in politics from PM Rishi Sunak down, and helping to shape the political debate within the pages of one of the country’s most influential newspapers.

A bonafide scoop getter, Kate has worked on some of the biggest political exclusives of the past few years, including the Chris Pincher groping scandal and stories about Nadhim Zahawi and his tax affairs. 

Before becoming The Sun on Sunday’s Political Editor she was deputy Political Editor at The Sun, where she covered the stormy years of Brexit, the Covid pandemic and the 2019 general election.

Kate is a regular commentator on political affairs for the BBC, Times Radio and other outlets.

Gavin Foster is the Editor of the Northern Echo. 

He is also Newsquest’s Regional Editor for the North of England, overseeing editorial operations in the North East, Yorkshire, Cumbria, North West and North Wales.

He has 27 years’ experience in agency and regional journalism  – previously also editing ChronicleLive for Reach Plc and was also managing editor for the then JPI titles in the North East, including the Sunderland Echo, Shields Gazette and Hartlepool Mail.

Gavin was also previously chair of the Northern branch of the Society of Editors.

Blathnaid Healy has more than 15 years of editorial and operational experience in media organisations and a track record of leading digital transformation in legacy newsrooms, start-ups and scale-ups. She is currently a senior leader at BBC News leading the Growth, Social and Delivery teams. She also leads the AI activities within the News division.

Previously, as CNN’s Senior Director, EMEA, Blathnaid led a multi-award-winning team of journalists and editors located across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She also had oversight of CNN’s global gender reporting unit As Equals and was its founding editor. Prior to CNN, Blathnaid established and opened Mashable’s first UK bureau as UK Editor and London bureau chief.

She is currently an Executive MBA candidate at Trinity College Dublin.

Tami Hoffman is Director of News Distribution and Commercial Innovation at ITN – the production house behind the news on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. She’s been at the sharp end of broadcast news for over 20 years covering elections, royal events and breaking news. Tami takes the commercial lead in ensuring maximum ongoing value from news footage – through syndication to broadcast and digital clients, social media monetisation and licencing of ITN’s extensive archive. She’s also added AI to her remit – instigating ITN’s AI guidelines and staff training programme, helping develop inhouse AI tools and identifying new opportunities from the emerging technology.

New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written or edited 28 books. In the eighties, he was one of the first editors of i-D, before becoming a contributing editor of The Face and editor of Arena. He spent the next decade working in newspapers – principally The Observer and The Sunday Times – before embarking on a multi-award-winning tenure at GQ. During his editorship, Conde Nast’s flagship men’s title won more awards than any other magazine – over 80. A former columnist for The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday and The Independent, he is a Trustee of the Hay Festival, and, along with ex-Disney executive Maggie Todd, a partner in BEACON FILMS. In 2012 he was awarded an OBE for services to publishing. He is currently the Editor-In-Chief of The Evening Standard.

Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times and one of Britain’s leading foreign journalists as well as a bestselling author.  She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots from Afghanistan to Ukraine after an unexpected wedding invitation led her to Karachi in 1987 when she was just 21, quickly being named Young Journalist of the Year. She has gone on to win numerous awards including six times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year. as well as Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux, and was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Editors and Outstanding Impact Award by Amnesty International for her work on ISIS camps in Syria. She has always particularly focused on what happens to women in war and collected accounts of sexual violence in conflict from all over the world for her recent book Our Bodies, Their Battlefields  described by leading historian Antony Beevor as ‘the most powerful book’ he had ever read and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Bailie Gifford and the Kapuscinski award.  Her  ten books include co-writing the global bestseller I Am Malala with Malala Yousafzai. She is a Global Envoy for UN Education Cannot Wait, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an Honorary Fellow of University College Oxford, on the International Board of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, an Associate of the Imperial War Museum, and was made an OBE by the late Queen in 2013.

Chief Constable Andy Marsh QPM joined the College of Policing as Chief Executive
Officer in 2021. He is the longest serving Chief Constable in England and Wales and has a
breadth of experience to draw from as the leader of policing’s professional body. Positioning the College as a relevant, dynamic, and connected system leader he is driving policing improvement based on the evidence of what works, by delivering betters standards and improving leadership.

Andy’s police career started in 1987 as a constable in Avon and Somerset Police. After
operational and detective roles at various ranks, he went on to lead Hampshire and, latterly, Avon and Somerset, as Chief Constable. He oversaw large-scale transformation at Hampshire, leading the force to be recognised as one of the best value for money nationally. In Avon and Somerset, he led the internationally acclaimed approach to data by using advanced predictive analytics and visualisation to manage demand in tandem with equipping officers and staff with the latest technology. This enabled the Force to be recognised as one of the most efficient and effective.

Andy played a significant role as the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for
body worn video where he pioneered the increased use of this vital technology.
Andy was responsible for the NPCC International Coordination portfolio for six years, leading and advising on police modernisation programmes globally.

In 2018, he was awarded a Queen’s Police Medal, and in the same year he was recognised
by Women of the Future in its list of ’50 Kind Leaders’. He is married with two daughters and enjoys fly fishing, hill walking, and rowing.

Jonathan Munro was born in Sheffield and educated at Nottingham University. He joined the BBC in January 2014.
He is now Deputy Chief Executive of BBC News, and the Corporation’s Director of Journalism. For most of 2022, he acted as Interim Director of News – at a time when the BBC was covering the Ukraine war, significant political turbulence and the death of HM The Queen.
During this interim appointment, he sat on the BBC Board and the Director General’s Executive Committee.
Jonathan is a Trustee of BBC Children in Need, and led a flagship project focusing on mental health support for children and young people across the UK.
He was previously at ITN for 26 years, joining as an editorial trainee and going on to work as a correspondent in the UK, Europe and around the world. Jonathan covered the Balkans war, both Gulf wars and the Beijing and London Olympics. He has worked extensively in the United States, Russia and Africa, and was Europe Correspondent for three years and Political News Editor for two.
Jonathan received an RTS Judges’ Award for negotiating the UK’s first televised Prime Ministerial debates in 2010. More recently, he was Executive Producer of the BBC’s main debate programmes during the 2016 Brexit Referendum and 2017 and 2019 UK elections.

Robin Punt worked as a BBC Correspondent, reporting and producing for TV News for 13 years from the UK and also Europe, Afghanistan, Egypt, the USA and Australia. His journalism while at BBC Newsnight led to a change in the law in relation to the safeguarding of children and a cross-Whitehall review of over 2,500 private supplier contracts following the revelation that senior civil servants were being paid through their own private companies, minimising their tax liabilities.

He was the last reporter inside British—owned MG Rover at Longbridge, the first reporter to interview Julian Assange following his release from prison and has won BBC Ruby and Royal Television Society regional awards for video-journalism.

As Director of Communications at Help for Heroes, he helped raise £300m for service personnel and veterans wounded while in the service of our Nation and established the charity among the Top Ten UK Charity brands according to YouGov for seven consecutive years. He led campaigns which resulted in 2,000 veterans coming forward to seek help with poor mental health and was responsible for the Communications for HRH Prince Harry’s (now the Duke of Sussex’s) Invictus Games UK Team in London 2014, Orlando 2016 and Toronto 2017, sitting on the Ministry of Defence UK Team Board.

Since 2019, Robin has been Head of Corporate Communications for Essex Police, leading communications during and after the deaths of 39 men, women and children discovered in a lorry trailer in Grays in 2019 and the murder of Southend West MP Sir David Amess in 2021, an act of terrorism.

He was elected Vice-Chair of the Association of Police Communicators in 2022 and is the only former journalist to be admitted to the College of Policing’s national Executive Leadership Programme.

Simon helps run a newsroom of 2,500 people; oversees all Reuters news publishing assets; and manages the news budget and operations team. He joined Reuters in 2010 and ran investigations and enterprise reporting in Europe, Middle East and Africa for six years, editing multiple award-winning stories and series. Between 2017 and 2019 he was Regional Editor for EMEA and then led a project to rethink the way a newswire works in the 2020s. Before Reuters, Simon was a correspondent and then editor at Time magazine, reporting from more than 50 countries in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He has published short stories and wrote and produced an award-winning satirical movie about western aid workers and journalists in Africa.

Pia Sarma is the Editorial Legal Director of Times Newspapers Limited, the publisher of The Times and The Sunday Times, and Deputy General Counsel at News UK, London.  She advises the Editors and Journalists of both publications on all content issues including investigations, and leads the titles’ defence litigation which has over the years liberalised laws for public interest and investigative journalism. Pia has played a key role in the changes in law and regulation affecting journalism and free speech in the UK, campaigning for protections for journalism. Pia is Chair of the London Media Lawyers’ Association, an organisation representing UK broadcasters and publishers.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 Danielle has been travelling to the warzone to bear witness to one of the greatest atrocities in recent memory. From reporting on the Bucha massacre to finding evidence of mass graves in the back gardens of innocent civilians, to embedding with Troops in the Donbas and interviewing Russian prisoners of war, Danielle has spent months at a time on the ground in Ukraine to accurately report unfolding events. 

Most recently Danielle has been in Israel, where she deployed in October to cover the Hamas attacks. Since returning to the UK Danielle has focused on the UK defence beat, and how decisions made in Government impact foreign conflicts and the wider European region. She recently revealed that the Head of the Army was going to call for mass mobilisation of British civilians in the event of war in Russia – a story that set the agenda on the newsbeat, was followed internationally and forced Downing Street to respond.

Danielle began her career in Fleet Street on The Times graduate scheme, having spent the year before reporting on local papers. After five years she moved to The Daily Telegraph, first as an Assistant News Editor, then becoming a political journalist where she covered the rise and fall of Boris Johnson. She has been covering Defence full time since Russia’s invasion. 

Charles Thomson is a three-time Weekly Reporter of the Year. As Newsquest’s London investigations reporter, he specialises in in-depth crime reporting.

Between 2016 and 2019, whilst chief reporter/news editor at Essex’s Yellow Advertiser series, his investigation into the alleged cover-up of a 1980s paedophile network unmasked the ringleader as a secret police informant. The stories were shortlisted for the Paul Foot Award and won the Ray Fitzwalter Award for Investigative Journalism. After joining the Archant Investigations Unit in 2020, he turned the investigation into an acclaimed podcast series: Shoebury’s Lost Boys.

In 2021, after a lengthy legal battle, Charles became the first journalist ever to win access to deceased criminals’ police files under the Freedom of Information Act. The victory won him the Association of Online Publishers’ Local Hero Award and three commendations at the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Awards.

In 2023, Charles’s reinvestigation of an east end murder case uncovered new evidence, now being used to challenge the supposed killer Jason Moore’s conviction. The story led ITV’s national news, won another commendation at the Media Freedom Awards and earned three Regional Press Award nominations. He is currently turning Jason Moore’s story into his next true crime podcast series.