John Kampfner

[John Kampfner]

John Kampfner is Political Editor of the New Statesman. He has just finished touring the country promoting his latest book, Blair's Wars. The inside account of how the Prime Minister has taken Britain into conflict five times in six years, it was published by Simon and Schuster in September 2003 to wide critical acclaim.

He has presented several documentaries for BBC television and radio. In 2002 he won the Foreign Press Association award for Film of the Year and Journalist of the Year for his two-parter on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called 'The Ugly War'. His film 'War Spin', exposing the propaganda behind the rescue of Jessica Lynch, received considerable publicity in the US and UK.

He began his career as a foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph, first in East Berlin where he reported on the fall of the Wall and the unification of Germany, and then in Moscow at the time of the coup and the collapse of Soviet Communism. On returning to the UK in the mid-1990s, he became Chief Political Correspondent at the FT and political commentator for the BBC's Today programme.