Kampfner began his career as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Moscow and Bonn. He moved to The Daily Telegraph, first in East Berlin where he reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, and then as Bureau Chief in Moscow at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He went on to become chief political correspondent at the Financial Times and political commentator for the BBC's Today programme and political correspondent on Newsnight. In 2002 Kampfner won the Foreign Press Association awards for Film of the Year and Journalist of the Year for The Ugly War, a two-part BBC film on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His film War Spin, exposing the propaganda behind the rescue of Jessica Lynch, received considerable publicity in the US and UK. Kampfner was editor of the New Statesman from 2005-2008. He was the British Society of Magazine Editors Current Affairs Editor of the Year in 2006. He was named one of the 1000 most influential Londoners in the Evening Standard Progress 1000 survey in 2015, 2016 and 2017. In October 2015, he also won the Art and Design category at the HClub 100 awards. In 2008 he was Founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, an art gallery in Margate designed by architect Sir David Chipperfield which has been seen as a model of arts-based regeneration. During his time, he welcomed the Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge on visits. In December 2015 he stepped down after seven and a half years. Kampfner was chair of the Clore Social Leadership Programme between 2014–18, a charity which nurtures leaders in the charity sectors. He was also a member of the Council of King's College London for three years. He was Chief Executive of the freedom of expression organisation Index on Censorship between 2008 and 2012. From 2012 to 2014 he was an external consultant for Google on freedom of expression and culture. In 2014 he established the Creative Industries Federation, a national organisation to represent the arts, creative industries and cultural education. In 2019 he became a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI and a columnist at the Times and New European newspapers. He is also an adviser to the Frankfurt Book Fair. He is Chair of the House of Illustration. In 2019 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Bath Spa University for services to arts education and the creative industries.
Publications
Kampfner has written six books. These include: Inside Yeltsin's Russia: Corruption, Conflict, Capitalism, an account of the early years of post-Communism; a 1998 biography of former Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, and a study of Tony Blair's interventionist foreign policyBlair's Wars, which gave one of the first authoritative accounts of the Iraq war and used in subsequent Whitehall enquiries, as well as school and university texts. His book Freedom For Sale: How We Made Money And Lost Our Liberty is an analysis of the seeming abandonment of liberty in the names of democracy and capitalism. The book was shortlisted for the Orwell Book prize in April 2010. The Rich, a 2000-year history, from slaves to super-yachts, is a historical comparison between contemporary oligarchs and those down the ages. His latest book, Why The Germans Do It Better, Notes From A Grown-Up Country, will be published by Atlantic in September 2020. It looks at how post-war Germany acquired a level of political and societal maturity that other countries, not least Britain, struggle to match.
Personal life
In 1992, Kampfner married BBC journalist Lucy Ash. The couple have two daughters and live in London.
