Democracy on Trial: The promise of democracy Dex Hunter-Torricke (keynote speaker), Gavin Esler (keynote chair), Claire Ainsley, Paul Cartledge, Danny Dorling, Daniel Trilling and Sam Fowles (chair)

Dex Hunter-Torricke is the Founder and President of Center for Tomorrow. He has spent almost two decades at the intersection of technology, international affairs and public life, advising founders and leaders of some of the world’s most consequential organisations, including SpaceX, Facebook/Meta, Google and the United Nations, while developing a deepening conviction that the decisions being made inside these organisations are inadequate to the scale of what is coming. The son of a refugee from Burma and an immigrant from Malaysia, and the first in his family to earn a university degree, he brings both an insider’s understanding of how these systems work and an outsider’s clarity about who they too often fail. In October 2025, Dex announced he was leaving Big Tech to dedicate himself to building the ideas, communities and leadership capacity the world urgently needs.

Gavin Esler is an award-winning journalist, television presenter, political commentator and author. He was a main presenter of the BBC current affairs show Newsnight for 12 years until 2014. He presents the podcast This Is Not a Drill and is the author of books including Britain Is Better Than This (2023) and How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations (2021).

Claire Ainsley is Director of the Center-Left Renewal Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. From 2020 to 2022 she was Executive Director of Policy to Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and the UK Labour Party. Prior to this, she was Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, leading JRF’s strategy to inspire action and change to solve UK poverty. In May 2018 she authored The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes.

Professor Paul Cartledge is AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, UK, and Emeritus AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, where he taught from 1979 to 2014. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of well over a score of books, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece; The Spartans: An Epic History; Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past; Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World; and Democracy: A Life. He co-edits a monograph series, sits on the editorial boards of three learned journals and serves as consultant in ancient history to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta, Greece. He also holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic.

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, UK. He appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and other papers. He advises government and the office for national statistics. Among his books are All That Is Solid; Population 10 Billion; So You Think You Know About Britain?; and Injustice. His latest book is The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future (Verso, May 2025).

Sam Fowles is a barrister specialising in public and constitutional law, with experience of law in the UK, US, Australia and at the Council of Europe. He has worked on many of the most significant political cases of recent years. He regularly appears in the media, including on the BBC, Sky and Al Jazeera.

Daniel Trilling is the author of If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. He writes about nationalism, migration and human rights for publications including the London Review of Books, the Guardian and the New York Times. His work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Political Book Awards and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.