• About Alex

  • Alex Singleton is a journalist at the Daily Telegraph who has been described by Lord Malloch Brown (former Deputy General Secretary of the UN) as "the high priest of globalisation" and whose work has been discussed in a Rowan Williams sermon.

    He is part of the daily PoliticsHome survey of 100 leading opinion formers.

    He has previously written for The Guardian and The Daily Express, and for wide a range of newsstand magazines.

    Alex is a regular commentator on the television and radio, and has appeared on programmes and stations such as the BBC's Newsnight, the Today programme, The Moral Maze, Richard Bacon, CNN, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 News, CNBC, Bloomberg and Sky News.
  • Current affairs

  • A dinner party on the Underground
  • Saturday was the last night that consuming alcohol was allowed on the London Underground. On Three Line Whip, I criticise the violent hooliganism that took place to mark the ban: there is “something deeply unpleasant about sharing public transport late at night with large groups of shouting drunk people”. In researching YouTube footage of Saturday, [...]

  • International development

  • People and profits go hand in hand
  • On Telegraph.co.uk, I put the case for private sector management of poor country water systems, arguing that opponents:
    …do not have the empirical evidence on their side. The main cause of water poverty in poor countries is state mismanagement, both of water systems and of resources. 97% of the water distribution in poor countries is run [...]

  • World Bank spends aid money producing blog-reading software
  • The World Bank puts out many interesting publications but out on the ground, its legacy is one of failure. Remarkably, 65% to 70% of World Bank projects in Africa fail. Its efforts to fight corruption were fundamentally undermined this year by the Bank’s own board in its decision to remove Paul Wolfowitz (based on spurious [...]

  • The rise of the private sector shows future for the World Bank
  • Political interference in the World Bank by the likes of Britain’s Hilary Benn is bad news for developing countries. While organisations like Transparency International rightly point out the damage corruption does to the fight against global poverty, political pressure means the Bank’s anti-corruption agenda is being seriously undermined. Thankfully, private capital markets are making the [...]

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Speeches

Alex is a popular speaker noted for his ability to communicate complicated subjects in a simple way - and grip an audience. He has spoken to audiences of 30-700, to House of Commons & Lords select committees, to conferences from Berlin to Las Vegas, and at debating societies at universities (including the Oxford Union, Cambridge Union and Trinity College Dublin)

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