Gideon Rachman

Gideon Rachman (born 1963) is a British journalist. He became the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times in July 2006. In 2016, he won the Orwell prize for political journalism. In the same year he was also named as commentator of the year at the European Press Prize awards.

He read History at Gonville & Caius College, gaining a first class honours degree from Cambridge University in 1984. While at Gonville and Caius, he was a friend of future MI6 renegade agent Richard Tomlinson, whom he provided with a reference for his Kennedy Scholarship application.

He began his career with the BBC World Service in 1984. From 1988 to 1990, he was a reporter for The Sunday Correspondent, based in Washington DC.

He spent 15 years at The Economist; first as its deputy American editor, then as its South-east Asia correspondent from a base in Bangkok. He then served as The Economist's Asia editor before taking on the post of Britain editor from 1997 to 2000, following which he was posted in Brussels where he penned the Charlemagne European-affairs column.

At The Financial Times, Rachman writes on international politics, with a particular stress on American foreign policy, the European Union and geopolitics in Asia.

Gideon Rachman maintains a blog on the FT site. His brother is Tom Rachman, the author of the novel The Imperfectionists. Their sister Emily died of breast cancer in 2012.

Rachman is noted for advocating a looser, non-federal European Union. In 2002, he staged a debate in Prospect magazine with Nick Clegg, who was then an MEP for the East Midlands. Clegg argued strongly that Britain should join the European single currency. Rachman disagreed, writing, "I believe the political changes involved in joining the Euro carry enormous risks. I do not believe it is 'progressive' or 'self-confident' to take those risks." More recently, Rachman has argued in the FT that the EU must take a flexible and open approach to the political demands of their member states or face failure. However, during the UK referendum on EU membership, Rachman argued for the UK to vote to stay inside the EU - arguing that the organisation, although flawed, was an important guardian of democratic values and security in Europe. Rachman was also one of the first commentators to predict that the UK would vote to leave the EU.

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