Tony Barber

Tony Barber is European Comment Editor at the Financial Times in London. He joined the newspaper in 1997 and served as bureau chief in Frankfurt (1998-2002), Rome (2002-2007) and Brussels (2007- 2010). He was Europe Editor from 2010 to September 2018. In 2012 Tony was awarded the Medal of Gratitude by the Solidarity Centre in Gdansk in recognition of his work in support of freedom and democracy in Poland in the 1980s.
He started his career in 1981 at Reuters news agency, serving as a foreign correspondent in New York, Washington and Chicago (1982-83), Vienna (1983), Warsaw (1984-85), Moscow (1985-87), Washington (State Department correspondent, 1987-88) and Belgrade (bureau chief, 1989). He worked from 1990 to 1997 at The Independent in London, where he was successively East Europe Editor and Europe Editor.
Among the major world events on which he has reported on the ground are the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, the 1991-95 wars of the Yugoslav succession, the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the post-2008 banking sector and eurozone debt crisis, and the 2017 Catalonian separatist challenge in Spain.

He studied from 1978 to 1981 at St John’s College, University of Oxford, where he received a BA First Class Honours degree in Modern History. He was born in 1960 in London.