Is the founder of the Brussels think tank Friends of Europe. He is a former Financial Times correspondent, and as a journalist, author and broadcaster, he has specialised in European public policy questions. In 2010, he was named by the Financial Times as one of 30 influential ‘Eurostars’. He joined the Financial Times in 1968, and from 1972 until 1983, he was successively the Financial Times correspondent in Paris, Dublin/Belfast and Brussels. From 1984 to 2010, he was a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, where his op-ed page articles ranged across EU political and economic issues. He is the author of several books, including When Ageing Explodes: Understanding the Demographic Time- Bomb (forthcoming), which examines the impact of ageing on Europe’s political economy; People Power: Why We Need More Migrants (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future (Oxford University Press 2016). His first book, World Out of Work (Collins, 1982), was an award-winning study of unemployment in industrialised countries. His second, The Challenge of Freedom (Kogan Page 1991), was about the difficulties facing post-communist Eastern Europe and was published in four languages.