Simon Walker (business)

Simon Walker
Simon Walker, Director General of the IoD

Simon Edward John WalkerCBE is Director General of the Institute of Directors, previously Communications Secretary to HM Queen Elizabeth II and an advisor to former Prime Minister, John Major. He was born and grew up in South Africa and has worked in media, politics and business in New Zealand, Belgium and the UK.

Walker was born in 1953 in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa. In 1961 he moved to the UK and attended Highgate Junior School, moving back to South Africa in 1964 to live in Cape Town and attend South African College High School there, followed by a return to the UK to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1974.

After graduating from Oxford in 1974, Walker become a TV journalist with TV One in NewZealand where he stayed for five years. During this time he presented current affairs programme Tonight, on which he interviewed Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, about his assertions regarding the Soviet naval presence in the Pacific, and New Zealand vulnerability to Russian nuclear attack. Muldoon, who had sought to give answers to questions which had already been submitted to him, resented Walker's line of questioning and snapped "I will not have some interviewer changing the rules half way through." In 1979, he moved to the United States, where he was appointed a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, California.