I am currently a freelance writer, journalist, editor, historian and consultant, working on assorted projects in print and in broadcasting, in addition to my own academic research. I recently released my second book, a popular narrative history of London’s “clubland”, which seeks to challenge many of our underlying assumptions about these uniquely strange places.

I grew up in several countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland, before settling in Britain. For several years of my childhood I was self-taught rather than in formal education, before I attended my local state comprehensive, Fortismere. I then read my first degree in History and Politics at Clare College, Cambridge (2003-6), before working as a researcher in the House of Commons (2006-7), and at the Leadership Centre (full-time 2007-8; part-time 2008-10), where I worked closely with senior politicians in all three main parties. From 2014-21, I returned to the Leadership Centre on a part-time basis as an external contractor, focusing on editing their publications. 

My MA in Modern History was completed at King’s College, London (2008-9), securing the top mark in my year and winning the Jinty Nelson Prize in History for my dissertation, which was on Winston Churchill’s 1922 election defeat at Dundee, and its ramifications for our understanding of British political realignment in the 1920s.

I took a PhD at the University of Warwick on the 19th century political impact of London clubs, supported by a scholarship from the History of Parliament Trust, whilst being jointly supervised by both institutions (2010-4). A reworked version of the thesis was converted into my first book, Club Government, published by I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury in 2018, and shortlisted for the Whitfield Prize for the best history book by a first-time solo author. My most recent academic post was as an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford (2015-9), where I was research assistant to Michael Crick on the official biography of the psephologist David Butler. I later also did some research for Crick’s biography of Nigel Farage. I have taught at a range of universities, including Georgetown, London, Oxford and Warwick, as well as at other institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Since completion of my doctoral thesis in 2014, my research has focused on two distinct strands - the history of clubs (particularly their global dimension, including their post-colonial legacy) and sociability more generally; and the history of corruption.

I have produced well-received journalistic and academic work in both areas; and alongside my colleagues at openDemocracy (where I was an Investigative Reporter from 2019-23), my investigative work on “cash-for-peerages” made up part of the winning Press Gazette British Journalism Award in 2022, for “Best Campaign of the Year”, for openDemocracy’s work on transparency in public life. The same work had also been shortlisted for the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Award for “Best Campaign” in 2022; and I had previously been shortlisted alongside openDemocracy colleagues in 2020, for a British Journalism Award for “Best Investigation” around the UK government’s Covid-19 response.

I spent two months of 2019 following the Indian general election on the ground, travelling 3,000 miles within the country, after a stint as research assistant on Prannoy Roy and Dorab R. Sopariwala’s #1 bestseller The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections, published by Penguin India in 2019. More recently, from 2022-4 I was the principal research assistant for Will Hutton, on his book This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain, published by Apollo in 2024.

In recent years, I have done more podcasting with the Podmasters studio, intermittently since 2020; and since 2022 I have been a regular panelist on their current affairs programme Oh God, What Now?, and an interviewer on their daily culture show, The Bunker. I am currently working on my own show, Scandal! - a deep dive into the history of British political scandals, and their cultural impact.

I am bilingual (my first language was French), and hold dual British and Swiss citizenship. A devoted admirer of Portugal and all things Portuguese, I am still struggling to become proficient in the language.

In my spare time, I am a Trustee of the John Stuart Mill Institute; am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Liberal History; and am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.