John O'Sullivan, CBE is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. During the 1980s, he was a senior policywriter and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death. O'Sullivan served from 2008–2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He was editor of the Australian monthly magazine Quadrant from 2015 to 2017. Since 2017, he has been president of the Danube Institute, a think tank based in Budapest, Hungary, and also a member of the board of advisors for the, an NGO that works behind the scenes in crisis areas around the world.
O'Sullivan is a former editor and current editor-at-large of the opinion magazine National Review and a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He had previously been the editor-in-chief of United Press International, editor-in-chief of the international affairs magazine, The National Interest, and a special adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1991 New Year's Honours List. In 1998 O'Sullivan was a leading member of the journalistic team that founded the National Post, a right-leaning national newspaper in Canada. O'Sullivan is the founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative, an international organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies. The organisation was created at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher. In 2013, O'Sullivan became first the director and then president of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank. The Danube Institute exists to provide an independent centre of intellectual debate for conservatives and classical liberals and their democratic opponents in Central Europe. Based in Budapest and Washington, D. C., it seeks to engage with centre-right institutions, scholars, political parties and individuals of achievement across the region to discuss problems of mutual interest. The Institute also seeks to establish a two-way transmission belt for centre-right ideas, policies and people between Central Europe, Western Europe, and the English speaking world, and to provide an authoritative source of rational and commonsense reporting and commentary for those covering Central Europe for the world outside the region. Concurrently, in February 2015 O'Sullivan also became the editor of the Australian monthly magazine Quadrant. Beginning in January 2017 he will step down as editor and become the international editor. O'Sullivan has published articles in Encounter, Commentary, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Policy Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Spectator, The Spectator, The American Conservative, Quadrant, The Hibernian and other journals, and is the author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. Philosopher Roger Scruton praises O'Sullivan's book, which "forcefully" argues "that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse. And my own experience confirms this." He also lectures on British and American politics and is the Bruges Group's representative in Washington DC.
Views
O'Sullivan's first law
He is known for "O'Sullivan's first law" :
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
Multiculturalism
In an article, O'Sullivan wrote: "After all, radical Islamists have three advantages on their side: demography ; rapidly growing Islamic diasporas in the West, fueled by illegal immigration; and official Western policies of multiculturalism...the decline of Christian belief and social influence; and the habit of respecting other cultures as unities while treating the West as a kind of multi-cultural supermarket in which Western civilization is merely one rather dusty shelf. To these trends politicians add appeasement, both diplomatic and electoral ". On July 18, 2005, O'Sullivan wrote an article titled, "The Islamic Republic of Holland. How One Nation Deals with a Revolutionary Problem". In a review, O'Sullivan says "The new policy accelerated the transformation of Britain into a multicultural society with racial and religious tensions; terrorist murders, bombings, and beheadings; physical attacks on gays in East London; the extraordinary epidemic of the rape and sexual grooming of underage girls...hostile demonstrations against British soldiers returning from Afghanistan; an estimated 74,000 cases of female genital mutilation by 2006; the occasional honor killing; and excellent restaurants".
Private life
O'Sullivan currently resides in Budapest with his wife Melissa.
