Policy Exchange, which has been a terrific addition to the think tank scene, has appointed a new Director. It couldn't have chosen better than Anthony Browne.

When he was at the Observer, he wrote a superb piece arguing that the NHS was an idea whose time had passed. For the then Health Editor of the Observer to write such a piece was brave. He was similarly brave when he wrote Do We Need Mass Immigration? for Civitas, a well-argued case against the pro-immigration status quo of the chattering classes. His book was one of the first to put forward the necessary argument that immigration policy needed to be reassessed from first principles, and that the stifled debate on the problems of mass immigration was dangerous. (My praise is not because I agreed with him; I took part in a Civitas debate with him, arguing that he was wrong.)

The great thing about Anthony Browne is that he cannot be labelled politically. He has the proper approach for a think tank head of looking at issues not from a political perspective but from objective facts. Under him, i expect Policy Exchange to be even more successful.