Chris Huhne

Outside Politics

Before Chris entered politics, he was an economic and financial journalist for nineteen years, and a City economist for five years. Chris is the Liberal Democrats’ shadow Home Secretary, speaking for the party on crime, terrorism and immigration.

After Oxford University, Chris won his trade union card as a journalist by reporting under cover from India during Mrs Gandhi’s emergency, when other western journalists had been expelled. His travels around India gave him an abiding interest in third world development. In 1977, Chris became Britain’s youngest staff foreign correspondent when posted to Brussels by The Economist where he covered the European Union and the world trade talks.

Chris wrote an award-winning economics column every week for ten years, first for the Guardian and then for the Independent on Sunday. He then edited the business sections of both the Independent and Independent on Sunday. Chris also won two prestigious Wincott Awards: both as junior and then senior financial journalist of the year.

In 1994, Chris founded what became one of the largest teams of economists in the City to rate the risks of overseas investments for pension funds and other investors.

Chris has written four books, mainly on the themes of third world debt and development, European integration and the Euro, and general economics. In his 1990 book “Real World Economics”, Chris was an early advocate of tackling global warming. He has also contributed many articles to collections on British politics and policy, including an article about the reform of the United Nations and globalisation to the “Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism” (2004). Chris also wrote a weekly column about Europe for the London Evening Standard from 1999 to 2002.

Chris was educated at Westminster School, at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne and at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he took first class honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He has five children and one grandchild.