Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship

Jamie Bartlett is a British author and journalist, primarily writing for his newsletter How to Survive the Internet. He has previously written for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He was a senior fellow at Demos and served as director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos until 2017.

Rosie Beacon is Head of Partnerships at Helfie.AI, an AI enabled screening app that supports rapid detection of the most common long term conditions, like high blood pressure. She leads partnerships with the NHS to support real world deployment and scale. Prior to Helfie, Rosie worked at the non-partisan think tank Re:State, where she led its work on NHS reform, authoring papers on virtual hospitals and the first paper proposing the abolition of NHS England. Rosie spent four years at the Tony Blair Institute and began her career supporting an equity derivatives trading desk at a major investment bank.

Ekaterina Hertog (DPhil Sociology, 2003) is the Associate Professor of AI and Society at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie at the intersection of digital sociology and family sociology. Her current research explores how digital technologies transform family life, with a particular focus on the adoption and impact of AI and digital technologies in childcare. Her recent work examines the societal implications of digital monitoring technologies, investigating how these technologies affect parent-child relationships, children’s autonomy, and family well-being.

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and writes regularly on politics and policy for the Observer the FT and others. Sam’s substack newsletter ‘Comment is Freed’ is the most popular in the UK and has over 80,000 subscribers. His first book Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How to Fix It was released in July, made the Sunday Times bestseller list and was named an Economist, FT and Daily Telegraph book of the year. Sam is also a senior adviser to the education charity Ark; Vice-Chair of Ambition Institute; and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College.

He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2006 and conducts research in a wide area of comparative politics and political economy. Before joining Oxford and Nuffield College he was an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

His initial research focus was the politics of education, with his book From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Politics of Education, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and winning the William H. Riker prize for best book in political economy. His second book, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, coauthored with David Samuels and published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 won the Woodrow Wilson APSA Best Book Prize and the William H. Riker best book in political economy prize. His third book, coauthored with Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Public Services, was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. His work has been published in International Organization, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, and the American Political Science Review.

David Freud’s first career was as a journalist, training in Cardiff on the Western Mail and then moving to the Financial Times, where he spent his last four years writing the Lex Column. In 1984 he began his second career, in the City, where he specialised in equity markets, company flotations and transport. His most dramatic deal was the flotation of Eurotunnel in the teeth of Black Monday. He ended up as Vice Chairman at UBS before retiring in 2003. Afterwards he wrote a book on the experience called Freud in the City.

A spectacular failure as a retiree, he took up a job as CEO of the Portland Trust, which worked on both sides of the Israel/Palestine divide. Here he designed the initiative to build Rawabi, the first planned city for Palestinians in modern times.

He also produced an independent report for the UK Labour Government on welfare to work in 2007, called Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity. This led to a job as Conservative Minister for Welfare Reform (2010-16), where he worked to reshape the British welfare system. In particular he was involved in creating and shaping Universal Credit, to break the poverty and welfare traps. He described the gruelling experience in another book: Clashing Agendas

He created the Grandmentors programme in 2009, working with the charity Volunteering Matters. This provides older mentors for children leaving care. He became President of Volunteering Matters in 2019.

Thomas Elston is Associate Professor of Public Administration at the Blavatnik School of Government. He is the author of Understanding and Improving Public Management Reforms (Policy Press, 2024), and Co-Director of the London PhD Colloquium for Public Management.

Dr Elston’s research focuses on the organisation and management of public services, particularly in terms of performance, resilience, reform and democratic control. At the School, Thomas teaches classes on political science and public management, and conducts workshops for senior leaders on strategy, organisational learning and resilience.

Thomas also consults for governments in Europe and North America on issues related to inter-organisational collaboration, civil service performance and public sector reform.

Jonathan is ranked in Chambers and Partners 2024 in POCA, extradition and Inquests and Public Inquiries, and in the Legal 500 2024 in POCA and International Crime and Extradition. He has a wealth of experience handling unusual, sensitive or controversial matters, in the fields of asset recovery, mutual legal assistance, national security, human rights, confiscation, tax and duties, law enforcement, extradition, inquests and immigration, and wherever criminal law interfaces with public law. Before taking Silk, Jonathan was a grade 4 prosecutor and on the Attorney General’s Civil A Panel.

In May 2019, Jonathan Hall KC was appointed by the Home Secretary as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. As with previous Reviewers, this is a part-time role which Jonathan principally conducts from Chambers. As a result of this appointment, there are certain limits as to the instructions that Jonathan can accept – his clerks will be happy to discuss.

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s social media investigations correspondent and an award-winning journalist. She presents podcasts and documentaries investigating the real-world consequences of what’s unfolding on social media – disinformation, hate, algorithms – for BBC Radio 4, BBC Panorama and BBC Three. Her latest series include Marianna in Conspiracyland and Why Do You Hate Me. She is also one of the presenters of the BBC’s Americast podcast. She was been named Best Host at both the ARIAS and British Podcast Awards. Her first book Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland was published in 2024 by Atlantic.

Mitali Mukherjee is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism. She was a Chevening fellow for the South Asia Journalism Fellowship 2020, a Raisina Asian Forum for Global Governance Young Fellow 2019 and a 2017 fellow of the Australia India Youth Dialogue. In 2020, she was nominated for the prestigious Red Ink Awards in India for two of her business stories.

Over the course of her journalistic career, Mitali has been Consulting Business Editor at The Wire and Mint. Prior to that she was Markets Editor at CNBC TV 18 and Prime Time Anchor at TV Today and Doordarshan. She has been a Fellow at The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) where she led Gender Initiatives for the organisation. Mitali has also co-founded two start-ups that focused on civil society and financial literacy.

She is a gold medallist in Television Journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) New Delhi, 2001 and a gold medallist, Political Science Hons., Delhi University, 2000. She is also a TEDx speaker.

Pauline Neville-Jones is a Conservative member of the House of Lords where she sits on the Science and Technology Committee.

She began work in the Diplomatic Service serving in, among other places, Washington, the European Commission, as Head of the Policy Planning staff, Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Bonn. She took part in the negotiations leading to German Unification and was the negotiator for the UK of the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia.

Subsequently she worked in the City and, as Chairman, prepared the government owned technology company, QinetiQ, for IPO. She designed the National Security Council which came into operation in 2010 and served as Minister of State for Security and Counterterrorism in the coalition government under Prime Minister Cameron. She is active in cyber security and resilience.

She has been a BBC Governor and a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She is an honorary fellow of Lady Margaret Hall Oxford and has honorary degrees from London, Lancaster and Open Universities. She is a Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, a Privy Councillor and a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

Lucas Kello is the Director of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, a University-wide initiative sponsored by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Nusrat Ghani is the Conservative MP for Sussex Weald. In 2015 Nusrat made history as the first female Muslim MP ever to be elected as a Conservative and remains a minority of one in her party.

In July 2024, Nusrat was elected Chairman of Ways and Means, becoming only the second woman to hold the post and the first person of colour to serve as Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. In this role, she chairs daily debates in the Chamber and holds senior responsibilities, including Chair of the Speaker’s AI Steering Group.

Nusrat migrated to the UK along with her family and not only is she the first female to attend University but she is also the first girl to attend school. Her mother and grandmother are illiterate as they were denied access to formal education.

As an MP, Nusrat has served on the Business, Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs Select Committees and as rapporteur for NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly Science and Technology Committee. She has led major inquiries into antisemitism, child sexual abuse, violent extremism and Uyghur forced labour, resulting in sanctions against her by both China and Russia—the only woman in Parliament to be sanctioned by two countries.

She became the first female Muslim Minister in 2018 and has since served in senior ministerial roles across transport, industry, economic security and foreign affairs, including as Minister of State for Europe at the FCDO.