Philip Stephens

Plenary Session II - "Collective Memory or Collective Future?"

Session 2 - "Is Democracy in Crisis?"

Mr. Philip Stephens is director of the editorial board of the Financial Times. He is also the newspaper’s chief political commentator. He is vice-chair of the Council of the Ditchley Foundation, a member of steering group of the Anglo-French Colloque and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin. Mr. Stephens is a frequent speaker and moderator at international conferences on European, transatlantic and global affairs, and offers analysis and advice to business leaders on geopolitical risk. He has spoken recently at events hosted by Chatham House, the Xiangshan Forum, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Aspen Italia, the German Marshall Fund, the Asan Forum, the Stockholm China Forum, the Franco-British Colloque and at other high-level meetings of policy and business leaders. Mr. Stephens is also a frequent broadcaster. He is the author of Politics and the Pound, a study of British economic and European policy, and of Tony Blair, the Price of Leadership, a biography of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has won the three main prizes in British political journalism, being named successively as winner of the David Watt prize for Outstanding Political Journalism, as Political Journalist of the Year by the UK Political Studies Association, and as Political Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards. Mr. Stephens was educated at Wimbledon College and at Oxford University, where he took an honours degree in modern history. He travels widely. Among his hobbies are conversations with his adult children.