The Financial Times has appointed Lucy Fisher as its next Whitehall editor.
Fisher will join the FT in May from Times Radio, where she has been chief political commentator for a year.
She fills the role vacated by Sebastian Payne, who left the FT in December to become director of the centre right think tank Onward.
FT editor Roula Khalaf described Fisher as “one of the sharpest and smartest reporters covering UK politics today”.
In the Whitehall editor job, Fisher will “cover the stories behind the headlines from Westminster, with a particular focus on the Conservative party and foreign policy”, the newspaper said. She will also write a monthly column and co-host the weekly Political Fix podcast.
Fisher said: “I am absolutely thrilled to be joining the FT, a newspaper I have long admired as a reader. I can’t wait to get stuck into this exciting role at such a pivotal time in British politics, and I look forward to working with [political editor] George Parker and the outstanding Westminster reporting team.”
Before joining Times Radio Fisher was deputy political editor at The Daily Telegraph and previously chief political correspondent and then defence editor at The Times.
In 2013, aged 24, she won the prestigious Anthony Howard award and a £25,000 prize for her 5,000 word essay plan to investigate backbench MPs. As a result she spent a year working with The Times, The Observer and the New Statesman.
She told Press Gazette in 2019 she believed that “working in news is the best job in the world” and that “breaking stories that have a real world impact on policy and changing people’s lives for the better is what makes me tick”.
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