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Lord Mandelson is Chairman of strategic advisory firm Global Counsel. He is a former European Trade Commissioner and British First Secretary of State.

Prior to this, he held a number of Cabinet posts under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Northern Ireland Secretary and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was Member of Parliament for Hartlepool in the UK from 1992 until 2004 and Director of Campaigns and Communications for the Labour party between 1985 and 1990.

As well as Chairman of Global Counsel, Peter is a Senior Adviser to Lazard. He is President of the German-British Forum, the UK’s primary bilateral forum for promoting dialogue on German-British business, social and political issues and President of the Great Britain China Centre.

Peter is Chairman of the Design Museum in London and Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University.

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George Magnus is an independent economist and commentator, and Research Associate at the China Centre, Oxford University, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

George was the Chief Economist, and then Senior Economic Adviser at UBS Investment Bank from 1995-2012. He had a front row seat and key managerial position for multiple episodes of boom and bust in both advanced economies and emerging markets, including notably the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. George famously anticipated it in 2006-2007 with a series of research papers in which he warned of an impending Minsky Moment. Whilst at UBS, he served for four years as the Chair of the Investment Committee of the pension and life assurance fund. For four years until 2016, he served finally as an external senior adviser with clients of the investment bank.

He had previously worked as the Chief Economist at SG Warburg (1987-1995), and before that in a senior capacity before ‘Big Bang’ at Laurie Milbank/Chase Securities, and before that, Bank of America in London and San Francisco.

George is closely followed nowadays for his insights and observations about the global economy in general, and China and demographics, in particular. His China focus derives from a long period of observation and study that goes back to his first visit in 1994. He also opines regularly on demographic trends around the world, as well as on key issues nowadays such as Brexit, and the US and world economy. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, Prospect Magazine, BBC TV and radio, Bloomberg TV and other outlets. His written work and a blog can be found on his website at www.georgemagnus.com

George’s current book, Red Flags: why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy was published in September 2018 by Yale University Press. It examines China’s contemporary economic and commercial challenges and aspirations to modernity in the light of a governance system that is a throwback to much earlier times in the People’s Republic. His earlier books are The Age of Aging (2008), which investigated the effects of the unique experience of demographic change on the global economy; and Uprising: will emerging markets shape or shake the world economy? (2011) which examined the rise of China and other major emerging markets, and questioned controversially the widely accepted narrative that China was destined to rule the world.

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Timothy Garton Ash is the author of ten books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last half century. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

His books are: ‘Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein …’ Die DDR heute (1981), a book published in West Germany about what was then still East Germany; The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1983), which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989), for which he was awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai; We the People: The Revolution of ’89 witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (1990; US Edition: The Magic Lantern), which was translated into fifteen languages; In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993), named Political Book of the Year in Germany; The File: A Personal History (1997), which has so far appeared in eighteen languages; History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (2000); Free World (2004); Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name (2009); and Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (2016), which draws upon a major Oxford university research project built around the 13-language website freespeechdebate.com.

After reading Modern History at Oxford, his research into the German resistance to Hitler took him to Berlin, where he lived, in both the western and eastern halves of the divided city, for several years. From there, he started to travel widely behind the iron curtain. Throughout the nineteen eighties, he reported and analysed the emancipation of Central Europe from communism in contributions to the New York Review of Books, the Independent, the Times and the Spectator. He was Foreign Editor of the Spectator, editorial writer on Central European affairs for the London Times, and a columnist on foreign affairs in the Independent.

In 1986-87 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Since 1990, he has been a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he directed the European Studies Centre from 2001 to 2006 and is now Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow. Since 2010, he has directed the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, based at St Antony's. He became a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2000. A frequent lecturer, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts and a Corresponding Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from St Andrew's University, Sheffield Hallam University and the Catholic University of Leuven.