Jason Mitchell (journalist)

Jason Mitchell is the youngest of three children (two sisters) and grew up in Croydon. His mother, Rosina Alison, was an office cleaner and his father, Arthur Francis, sold confectionery in Leather Lane, a street market in central London.

Education

Mitchell was educated at Sylvan High School (now Harris City Academy Crystal Palace), at the time a comprehensive school in north Croydon. He was the only pupil in his year of 250 children to achieve eight O-levels (the average was 1.2). He studied for his A-levels at John Ruskin Sixth Form College in Shirley, Croydon. He then had a gap year before proceeding on to Keble College, at the University of Oxford, from which he gained a 2:1 degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His contemporaries included Jacob Rees-Mogg, Therese Coffey, Louise Mensch, Mark Reckless and Daniel Hannan.

During his gap year, Mitchell combined working in the telesales department of Butlin's, the holiday company, and working as a research assistant for Sir Edward Heath, the former British Primer Minister. During that year, he also spent four months travelling from India back to the UK overland. He spent one night on the Great Wall of China, partying with German diplomats who happened to be on the wall at the same time.

At Oxford, Mitchell organised a China week (June 1992) to mark the third anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. This included a debate at the Oxford Union Society on the possibility of China becoming a liberal democracy (participants included Li Lu and Sir David Tang). A replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue was also erected in central Oxford. Trudi Styler made a film about the week.

In the summer of 1991, Mitchell was an intern in Washington DC for Esteban E. Torres, a Congressman and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. The following summer he interned for the British newspaper, The Independent, in its Washington DC bureau.

Journalism career

Between 1993 and 1994, Mitchell was a reporter on the local newspaper, the Spalding Guardian, based in Spalding, Lincolnshire.

For the rest of the Nineties, he was a financial journalist based in London. He was news editor of the weekly newspaper for independent financial advisers, Financial Adviser, part of the Financial Times Group, and edited its sister publication, Investment Adviser.

Between 1999 and the year 2000, Mitchell teamed up with Paul Flynn, the Labour MP for Newport West, to raise awareness about the dangers of endowment mortgages. After their campaign – which received considerable national media coverage – the proportion of mortgages with endowments attached plummeted from 30% to 3%.

In 2001, he was the Association of British Insurers’ life and pensions trade journalist of the year.

The following year, Mitchell moved to Buenos Aires in Argentina and established himself as a freelance journalist in that country (he lived there until 2009). He wrote for Institutional Investor magazine, Foreign Direct Investment magazine, Latin Finance magazine, International Financing Review and Euromoney. He also covered Argentina for the Financial Times and freelanced for the Daily Mail and The Sun.

In 2009, he moved to Santiago in Chile, where he continued working as a freelance journalist. In 2010, he lived and worked as a journalist in Venezuela.

In March 2014, Mitchell was forced to leave Venezuela after an extortion attempt was made against him.

Personal life

Mitchell is single and lives in Sevenoaks in Kent.

References

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