Sir Vince was for over 20 years Member of Parliament for the London constituency of Twickenham. A former leader of the Liberal Democrat party, he served in government as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade.

Sir Vince has a long association with ODI beginning in the 1960s, when he was an ODI Fellow in the Kenya Treasury. He was ODI’s Director of Research between 1976 and 1983 and Editor of the ODI journal Development Policy Review. Between 1983 and 1989 he was Special Adviser to Sir Sonny Ramphal in the Commonwealth Secretariat, and worked with the Brundtland Commission on Sustainable Development. Before becoming an MP, Sir Vince was Head of International Economic Studies at Chatham House and Chief Economist at Shell International. As well as his Distinguished Fellowship at ODI, Sir Vince is Professor in Practice at the LSE and Director of Element 2, a hydrogen infrastructure company.

He is the author of a number of books on politics and economics, most recently Money and Power: The World Leaders Who Changed Economics (Atlantic Books, 2021) and How to be a Politician: 2,000 Years of Good (and Bad) Advice (Penguin, 2022).