Tom Fletcher, CMG
MA, BA
Honorary Fellow
Tom served as Herford Principal between 2020-2024. He left his principalship to undertake the role of Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations.
He was previously the foreign policy adviser to three UK Prime Ministers (2007-11) and the UK’s Ambassador to Lebanon (2011-15). More recently, he has been a Visiting Professor at New York University, and chaired the International Advisory Council of the Creative Industries Federation, promoting Britain’s most dynamic and magnetic sector overseas. In 2018 he founded The Foundation for Opportunity. Tom led a review of British diplomacy for the UK Foreign Office in 2016, and on the future of the United Nations for the UN Secretary General in 2017. In 2018 he authored a report on the skills the next generation need to thrive in the 21st century. Tom served as the Vice Chair of Oxford University’s Conference of Colleges in 2023/24.
He has published four books: The Naked Diplomat: Power and Politics in the Digital Age (Harper Collins, 2016), Ten Survival Skills for a World In Flux (Harper Collins, 2022) and two novels, The Ambassador (Canelo, 2022) and The Assassin (Canelo, 2024)