About the Author:

Michael Harrison is a journalist, writer and former corporate adviser. He was one of the founder members of The Independent in 1986, going on to become the newspaper’s Business Editor and Deputy City Editor of the Evening Standard. He was named Business Journalist of the Year in 2001 in the British Press Awards for his exposé of the secretive world of nuclear waste reprocessing and commended in this category on a further two occasions. During a career in financial journalism spanning twenty five years he reported on some of the biggest stories of the day, including the Guinness and BCCI scandals, the collapse of Barings Bank, the demise of the carmaker Rover and the privatisation of Britain’s water, power, rail, airline and telecoms industries. He also covered the major events of the period that shook the world economy - Black Monday, Black Thursday, the dot.com crash of 2000 and the global recession that followed 9/11. After leaving business journalism in 2007, he worked in corporate advisory for some of Britain’s biggest companies on crisis communications, corporate reputation and mergers and acquisitions. He has now returned to journalism as a columnist with the Evening Standard.