Tom Fletcher, CMG

Tom Fletcher became Principal of Hertford College in September 2020. He is also currently serving as the Vice Chair of Oxford University’s Conference of Colleges.

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.

He has published three 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 a novel, The Ambassador (Canelo, 2022).