Alex HickmanFormer Business SpAD
Alex’s career has spanned working as a journalist, a management consultant, campaigner, entrepreneur and political adviser. After graduating from Edinburgh University where he was awarded the Simon Gray Politics Prize he worked as a sub-editor for Sarajevo’s best-selling daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje (1994) before moving to Tirana to write about Albania for the Economist Intelligence Unit (1995/96). He lived and worked in Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe running campaigns for an international NGO (1997/99). He was CEO of the business-led campaign opposing UK adoption of the Euro (1999/2003), co-founded and ran the Open Europe think tank (2005/6) and spent nine years as Founder & CEO of a business providing current affairs briefings to business audiences around the world (2007/2016), taking a sabbatical in 2016 to work for Vote Leave as its Outreach Director.
Alex was an adviser to David Cameron focusing on EU reform and relations with India (2006/7), and spent two and a half years as Special Adviser for Business, Appointments and Honours to Prime Minister Boris Johnson (2020/22). In the latter role he was responsible for leading the Prime Minister’s business engagement in the UK and around the world. He worked closely with the PM, ministers and officials at home and overseas, helping to design and deliver policy, build high impact collaborations inside and outside government, and leveraging No. 10’s convening power to progress the UK’s post-Brexit business priorities including becoming a science & tech superpower, leading the Green Industrial Revolution, making UK capital markets more competitive, promoting Global Britain as an investment partner, levelling up and making UK regulation the best in the world.
Alex chairs the African Mountain Research Foundation, a UK registered charity dedicated to safeguarding southern Africa’s mountain systems, and is a co-Founder of Plant For Our Lives, an award winning community tree and hedge planting charity based near his home in Wiltshire.
