Jonathan Black Keynote Speaker

Jonathan Black is a strategist, senior adviser and systems leader with 20+ years’ experience at the centre of the UK government across economic, security and international issues – and so brings a rare insight into how market and sovereign decisions shape each other.

Most recently prior to leaving government, he served as the Prime Minister’s G7 / G20 Sherpa and Deputy National Security Adviser for Economics. In this, he played a key role in navigating the UK’s US, EU and China interests, in developing the UK’s post Brexit economic strategy, including trade negotiations with the Trump and Biden administrations and the European Union; and in shaping the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Through his government service, he played a pivotal part in the UK’s approach to many of the most critical challenges over the past two decades, including the economic response to the financial crisis, Brexit and Covid.

He was CEO for the UK’s 2021 Presidency of the G7 during Covid-19 and alongside its Presidency of COP26. He was the Prime Minister’s Representative for the pioneering UK-hosted AI Safety Summit in 2023. He was Private Secretary and Press Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the UK Treasury. He was the UK Director at the European Investment Bank and UK Alternate Director at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.

He was Heywood Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford in 2023 where he published “The crossroads of geopolitics: policy making in a more complex and uncertain world” and is an Emeritus Governor of the London School of Economics, and is now a Visiting Distinguished Fellow at the School of International Public Affairs’ Global Energy Center at Columbia University.