Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor, Head of The Economist Radio and former Public Policy Editor at The Economist. She has been a Political Columnist for the Evening Standard since 2001. She is also the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Shows the Moral Maze and Free Thinking.
After graduating from Oxford with a degree in German and Philosophy, Anne studied for a year at east Berlin’s Humboldt University, specialising in East German literature and the effects of censorship. She joined The Times in 1988 and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from Eastern Europe during the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany and the break-up of Yugoslavia. She was the Times Bureau Chief in Germany, Yugoslavia and Moscow from 1992-1996.
In 1996 she became Deputy Editor of The Spectator and in 1998 moved to The Independent as Associate Editor. She joined the Evening Standard as Executive Editor in 2002, where she also wrote a weekly column. She has been Public Policy Editor of The Economist since 2011.
Anne is also a broadcaster, frequently appearing on television programmes such as Newsnight, Newsnight Review, Question Time and BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze. She is author of two books: ‘The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life & Legacy’ (1992) and ‘Man Without a Face: The Autobiography Of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster’ (2003 with Markus Wolf).