City Editor of the Daily Mail praises his time at Bradford School of Management for playing a major part in developing his career

Alex Brummer, pictured, graduated with an MBA from Bradford School of Management in the late 1970s. He then had a brief career in business before moving into finance and economics journalism. He is currently the City Editor of the Daily Mail.

He has taken part in a film project to celebrate the University of Bradford’s 50th anniversary: 50 Years, 50 Stories.

He said: “My time at the University of Bradford was a really important time in my life. It was an induction into the whole business world.

“I think in some respects my subsequent career was greatly advanced by that insight because I was working alongside some very dynamic young business people.”

Mr Brummer said he also has fond memories of the campus. “I also liked the location, it was slightly pastoral, it was very close to the moors and I used to enjoy going into Bradford itself and having tea in Brown Muff’s, which was a big department store downtown.”

He said his time at Bradford School of Management was hugely beneficial to his career as a financial journalist.

“When I became a financial and an economic journalist the accounting training that I received, the management training that I received and the case history teaching - which is what management schools do: they teach you by looking at business cases – has been extraordinarily helpful, providing me with an analytical background, which has been tremendously useful as a financial journalist,” said Mr Brummer.

Following his MBA at Bradford, Mr Brummer had a brief spell working in business before securing a place on the Guardian newspaper’s graduate trainee scheme when he was still in his early 20s. He remained at the Guardian for 26 years.

He said: “I was the main economics writer at the Guardian during the 1976 sterling crisis when the UK had to go to the IMF; one of only a few Western democracies that has had to do that in recent, modern times.”

Mr Brummer then went to work at the Washington bureau of the Guardian, where he covered the second presidential election of Jimmy Carter, both elections of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr. His work in this area earned him the 1989 Overseas Press Club award for the best foreign correspondent in the US.

He returned to London in 1989 to become the Guardian’s foreign editor, which saw him cover the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern Europe finally opening up from the heavy hand of the Iron Curtain, a particularly moving time for him.

“It was a very exciting moment; an exhilarating moment, to see democracy flood over Eastern Europe. For me it was particularly poignant because I come from a family which originated in Hungary, near the Czech border. To see these countries come out from the iron glove of Soviet rule was a very exciting moment for me,” said Mr Brummer, who is very involved in the UK Jewish community.

Mr Brummer, whose father came to England as an immigrant just before the Second World War 1939, is very involved in the Anglo-Jewish community.

His father’s parents were killed in Auschwitz. Two of his father’s sisters and niece were taken to Auschwitz in 1944 but remarkably survived the terror of the place and its awful practices.

He said: “It’s a tail of survival and that’s obviously a very important part of my being.”

More recently Mr Brummer led the Daily Mail's coverage on the 2007 run on Northern Rock, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the subsequent credit crunch.

Other awards Mr Brummer has received include Financial Journalist of the Year (British Press Awards).