David Owen was a Member of Parliament for twenty-six years from 1966 to 1992. Under Labour governments, he served as Navy Minister, Health Minister and Foreign Secretary. He was co-founder of the Social Democratic Party, established in 1981, and its leader from 1983 to 1990. He currently sits in the House of Lords as an independent Social Democrat. From 1992 to 1995, Lord Owen served as EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia. From 1999 to 2005, he was chairman of New Europe, an organisation that successfully campaigned for the UK to stay outside the Eurozone while remaining a member of the EU. But, with the EU increasingly becoming dysfunctional, he campaigned in the 2016 referendum for the UK to leave the EU. From 1995 to 2015 he had business interests in the US, Russia and the UK. He is the author of In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government, Military and Business Leaders since 1900 (revised edition 2016); Europe Restructured: The Eurozone Crisis and Its Aftermath (2012); The Health of the Nation: NHS in Peril (2014); The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906–1914 (2014) and Cabinet's Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940 (2016).



David Ludlow's career has spanned both the public and private sectors. After stints in the British Embassy in Moscow at the end of the Gorbachev era, and at the European Commission working on economic restructuring in Eastern Europe, he spent two years working with David Owen at the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia. Finishing his time at the FCO in the mid-1990s on the Russian Desk, he left government service to pursue a career in investment banking, focusing on emerging markets, initially in Central and Eastern Europe and later in the Middle East. Drawing on his experiences in both these career paths, he re-joined the civil service in 2013, heading UK Export Finance's business development activities until the end of 2016, when he left to pursue other interests.