James Harding is editor-in-chief of The Observer and founder of Tortoise Media. He previously served as director of news and current affairs at the BBC from 2012 to 2018. He was editor of The Times from 2007 to 2012, winning Newspaper of the Year in two of the five years he edited the paper. He was previously The Times’s business editor, having joined from The Financial Times where he worked as Washington bureau chief, media editor, and China correspondent – opening the paper’s bureau in Shanghai in 1996, the first European newspaper to do so since the 1949 revolution. Harding is the author of Alpha Dogs – How Political Spin Became a Global Business and co-presented On Background on the BBC World Service.