Philip Stephens is an associate editor of the Financial Times and its chief political commentator.

He is a director of the Ditchley Foundation for the furtherance of transatlantic understanding, a Fulbright fellow and is on the board of the Franco-British Colloque. He is a regular contributor to political and foreign affairs journals and radio and television news and current affairs programmes. He was named Political Journalist of the Year in the 2008 British Press Awards and in 2002 won David Watt Prize for outstanding political journalism. He was named in 2005 as Political Journalist of the Year by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

He joined the Financial Times in 1983 after working as a correspondent for Reuters in Brussels and has been the FT’s economics editor, political editor and editor of the UK edition. He is the author of Politics and the Pound, a study of the British government’s relations with Europe since 1979, and of Tony Blair, a biography of the former prime minister.