John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. During the 1980s, he was a senior policywriter and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.[1][2]
O'Sullivan served from 2008–2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.[3] He was editor of the Australian monthly magazine Quadrant from 2015 to 2017.[4][5]
Since 2017, he has been president of the Danube Institute[6], a think tank based in Budapest, Hungary, and also a member of the board of advisors for the Global Panel Foundation [de], an NGO that works behind the scenes in crisis areas around the world
O'Sullivan is a former editor (1988–1997) and current editor-at-large of the opinion magazine National Review[9] and a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.[10] He had previously been the editor-in-chief of United Press International, editor-in-chief of the international affairs magazine, The National Interest, and a special adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.[11] He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1991 New Year's Honours List.
John O'Sullivan, Mark André Goodfriend – 2015
In 1998 O'Sullivan was a leading member of the journalistic team that founded the National Post, a right-leaning national newspaper in Canada.]
O'Sullivan is the founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative, an international organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies. The organisation was created at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher.
In 2013, O'Sullivan became first the director and then president of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank. The Danube Institute exists to provide an independent centre of intellectual debate for conservatives and classical liberals and their democratic opponents in Central Europe. Based in Budapest and Washington, D. C., it seeks to engage with centre-right institutions, scholars, political parties and individuals of achievement across the region to discuss problems of mutual interest. The Institute also seeks to establish a two-way transmission belt for centre-right ideas, policies and people between Central Europe, Western Europe, and the English speaking world, and to provide an authoritative source of rational and commonsense reporting and commentary for those covering Central Europe for the world outside the region.
Concurrently, in February 2015 O'Sullivan also became the editor of the Australian monthly magazine Quadrant.[4] Beginning in January 2017 he will step down as editor and become the international editor.
O'Sullivan has published articles in Encounter, Commentary, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Policy Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Spectator, The Spectator, The American Conservative, Quadrant, The Hibernian and other journals, and is the author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006).
Philosopher Roger Scruton praises O'Sullivan's book, which "forcefully" argues "that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse. And my own experience confirms this."
He also lectures on British and American politics and is the Bruges Group's representative in Washington DC.
