Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship
We are delighted to announce that The Rt Hon Damian Hinds and Ms Stella Creasy will be the St Antony’s Visiting Parliamentary Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. The Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship elects two Members of Parliament – one from the governing party and the other from one of the main opposition parties – each year. These Visiting Parliamentary Fellows will visit the College regularly and organise a series of seminars on important political and other matters.
Photographs released under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
2026 seminar series theme: 19th century institutions, 21st century problems – what should MPs do next?
The 2026 Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship seminar series is jointly hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations.
Please note that the seminars are in-person only and not streamed or recorded.
Seminar 7: How are governments going to pay to make 19th century institutions fit to deal with 21st century problems?
How are you going to pay for any of it?
Monday 2 March, 5.00pm, Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre
Governments are spending a lot of money, including on debt interest, but most reforms cost money and society needs to pay for them. How and what consequences does this have for government planning?
Speakers:
Paul started as Provost of The Queen’s College Oxford in August 2025.
Before that he was director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies for 15 years, following periods as chief economist at the Department for Education and director of public spending at HM Treasury.
He is a columnist for The Times, and is a regular contributor to other broadcast and print media. He is a visiting professor at UCL and at York University.
Paul published the Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money in 2023. He was for 11 years a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, and has served on the council of the ESRC and of the Royal Economic Society.
Paul has also for the last five years been helping to lead the IFS Deaton review of inequalities, and will be lead author of a book based on this study which is due to be published in 2026.
Nick Macpherson is Chairman of C Hoare & Co, Britain’s oldest bank, and of the Scottish American Investment Company. He is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and sits as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords. He was Permanent Secretary to H M Treasury from 2005 to 2016, serving three Chancellors and leading the department through the financial and wider economic crisis which began in 2007. Prior to becoming Permanent Secretary, he ran the spending and tax sides of the Treasury. In the mid 1990s, he was Principal Private Secretary to Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown.
Michael McMahon is Professor of Economics at University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He previously worked at Warwick University and has also taught courses at INSEAD, NYU, Chicago Booth, Stanford, LBS and LSE. He has delivered capacity building courses throughout Asia with the IMF’s Singapore Training Institute. He worked at the Bank of England for many years. Between April 2019 and December 2025, he served as a Council member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, including a period as Chair of the Council.
He is a research fellow of the CEPR and was Director of their Research Policy Network on Central Bank Communication. He was Deputy Director of Nuffield Centre for Applied Macro Policy (NuCaMP). He was also affiliated with LSE’s Centre for Macroeconomics where he previously co-edited the CfM Survey. He was a member of the Royal Economic Society (RES) Council, and served as the Conference Secretary on the Executive Committee. He previously served as Deputy Programme Chair for the 2017 RES Annual Conference. He was an Economics Network advisory board member (2006-2011), Treasurer of the MMF Research Group (2016-2018) and was previously Director of Impact at CAGE, Warwick (2016-2019).
His interests lie in macroeconomics of monetary economics, fiscal policy, business cycles, inventories and applied econometrics. A key feature of his recent research is the use of interdisciplinary, data science techniques to understand communication and deliberation in central banks. His research has been published in journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics and numerous others.
He holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, and MSc, MRes, and PhD degrees in Economics from the London School of Economics.
Seminar 8: Is the changed relationship between voters and legislators due to the development of the Internet a boon for good decision-making – or a challenge?
Deliberative politics versus the Internet: is technology creating a democratic deficit?
Monday 9 March, 5.00pm, Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre
Constitutions like the US’s were deliberately designed to slow down decision-making and put ‘grit in the system’ (and England’s did so organically). Tech can speed things up dramatically with real-time polling and electronic voting, and facilitates a huge increase in immediate voter-to-legislator contact. Is that a boon for good decision-making or a challenge? Are there implications for parties and parliaments?
Speakers:
- Jolyon Maugham, founder and director of the Good Law Project
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.
Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet in the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford. She is Senior Advisor and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute, where she is helping to found a new Global Institute for Technology and Society at LSE. From 2018 to 2025, she founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government.
She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and six books on the topic, including Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008) and AI and Digital Era Governance (OUP, forthcoming). Her book Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press) won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017.
Public service appointments include the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC, from 2019) and the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA, from 2025).