Stephen Pollard

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Stephen Pollard is a British author and journalist, currently President of a free-market Brussels-based think tank, the Centre for the New Europe. He writes columns for several publications including The Times and the Daily Mail and maintains a lively Spectator blog. He is an alumnus of John Lyon School and Mansfield College, Oxford.

Pollard is an advocate of market-based based public service reforms.

He is a biographer of David Blunkett.

Formerly a journalist and leader-writer on the Daily Express, he left that paper in 2001 soon after it was taken over by Richard Desmond, a publisher of pornographic magazines, who began implementing radical cutbacks. His last leader for the paper, on the problems of the British farming industry, turned out to contain the words "Fuck you Desmond" spelt out with the first letter of each sentence.^[1]

He was one of the signatory founders 2005 of the Henry Jackson Society which advocates a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world. The fact of his having written for the Fabian Review in 1993 ("More Southern Discomfort"), discussing ways by which the Labour Party could reform itself enough to gain power, suggests that his career has seen a fair degree of political movement from Left to Right.

Michael Gove was accused of harbouring hostile attitude towards Islam and Muslims, exemplified in his book Celsius 7/7. The author William Dalrymple attacked the book as a "confused epic of simplistic incomprehension" and pointed that contrary to claims on the book's jacket that Gove was an authority on Islamist terror, he had in fact never lived or travelled in any Islamic country, knew little about Islamic history or theology, and showed no sign of having met or talked to any Muslims. ^[2] Stephen Pollard was one of those to have vigorously rejected Dalrymple's analysis and defended Michael.^[3]