Stuart Hudson

My introduction to politics came thirty years ago, leafleting after school in a council by-election in Glasgow’s east end. Later I held policy and strategy roles in a range of election campaigns and with frankly varying degrees of success. I also advised Gordon Brown in Downing Street when the last Labour government had to reorient its economic policy and political strategy in response to the global financial crisis.

When not working in politics, I’ve generally been studying or working in competition and regulation. I trained in EU competition policy with the Office of Fair Trading at a time when Europe was importing from the US a more economics-focused approach to antitrust enforcement. I worked for Ofgem in the mid-2000s when it pivoted from liberalisation to interventionism in response to rising energy prices. More recently as Senior Director of Strategy at the Competition and Markets Authority I led the work to develop the CMA’s new strategy post-Brexit.

My academic background is in corporate finance and this is my other main professional interest. As a Partner at the consulting firm Brunswick I’ve advised companies across Europe, North America and Asia on a wide range of transactions and regulatory issues. My UK M&A experience includes advising companies, ministers and regulators on many of the highest-profile transactions of the past two decades: Kraft/Cadbury, Pfizer/AstraZeneca, SoftBank/ARM, Melrose/GKN, Sainsburys/Asda and Microsoft/Activision.

Outside work I used to go regularly to the theatre and opera but now I operate an unpaid taxi service for two small children, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.