Hugo Duncan Dixon (born December 1963) is a British business journalist and the former editor-in-chief and chairman of the financial commentary website Breakingviews which he co-founded. He was the editor of the Financial Times Lex column from 1994 to 1999, and a visiting fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University. He is the great-grandson of former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.
Early life
Hugo Duncan Dixon was born in December 1963[1][2] to the ConservativeMPPiers Dixon and the artist Edwina Sandys. The couple divorced in 1970 when Dixon was six.[3] Dixon has an older brother, Mark Pierson Dixon, born in 1962.[4]
Dixon's first job was as an intern at The Economist in 1985. A year later, he became junior banking correspondent for the Financial Times (FT). In 1988, aged 24, he was seconded to work for the then Social Democratic Party (SDP) leader Bob Maclennan to write the manifesto for the party's merger with the Liberals.[5]Voices and Choices For All[6] became known as 'the dead parrot document' after the famous Monty Python sketch[7][8] because, when Liberal MPs read about its proposals in this paper, they barricaded their leader David Steel into his Commons office and told him he would be turfed out if he backed the controversial document – copies of which had already been left for journalists waiting at the press conference to announce the merger. Dixon also began working as telecoms and electronics correspondent for the FT in the same year.[5]
In 1993 Dixon became leader writer for the FT,[5] and a year later became editor of the paper's Lex column.[9]
Breakingviews
Inspired by an interview with Bill Gates in 1999, Dixon quit his job at the FT and co-founded – with his colleague from the FT, Jonathan Ford – Breakingviews, a website providing financial commentary.[10][11] In 2007, Dixon and Ford fell out and Ford left to help set up a rival financial commentary website at Reuters.[5]
In 2009, Dixon sold Breakingviews to Reuters for £13 million, making himself £2.5 million,[10] with a retention bonus for Dixon to stay on as the website's editor for the following three years.[12] The move meant that Ford lost his position at Reuters.[13] Dixon continued as Breakingviews editor until 2012[12][14] when he became its commentator-at-large.[15] For a time, he contributed a fortnightly column to the website.[16]
Pro-EU activism
Dixon is pro-EU and opposed to Brexit.[17] He is the chair and editor-in-chief of InFacts, a website that focuses on facts and factual analysis about Brexit.[18][19]
Dixon, Hugo (2000). The Penguin guide to finance. London: Penguin in association with BreakingViews.com. ISBN9780140289329.
Dixon, Hugo (2002). Finance just in time: understanding the key to business and investment before it's too late. New York London: Texere Publishing. ISBN9781587991493.
Dixon, Hugo (2014). The in/out question: why Britain should stay in the EU and fight to make it better. California: Scampstonian. ISBN9781496146670.
^Lee Williams, Geoffrey; Lee Williams, Alan (1989). "The beginning of the end". Labour's decline and the Social Democrat's fall. Basingstoke: Macmillan. p. 151. ISBN9781349199488.
"A flop for Bob and David". The Observer. 17 January 1988. p. 8. Cited in Cook, Chris (2010). "Merger most foul: 1987–1988". A short history of the Liberal Party: the road back to power. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 196. ISBN9781137056078.
