The following people are part of the Selection Committee that will choose the participants of the 2025 Young Königswinter Conference:
Tim Beyer Helm
Timothy Beyer Helm is on sabbatical from the European Parliament. Tim was elected Chair of the EMM European Movement Merseyside in 2017, and is Co-Founder of the Liverpool-based WWW WorldWide Wednesday network and YouTube channel. He is an elected individual member of the EPP’s WMCES Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies general assembly since October 2010. Tim completed his term of office as a Director of the New Europeans Association in 2019 and then became an elected member of the EM European Movement UK NC National Council. In June 2013, Tim joined the Executive Committee of the independent educational foundation, The European Atlantic Movement (TEAM Global).
In June 2010, Tim was appointed an adviser on transatlantic relations and outreach in the cabinet of the Secretary General of the European Parliament (EP). He was also a member of the Strategic Planning Team. Tim previously served as Special Adviser to EP Vice-President Edward McMillan-Scott MEP.
In September 1995, Tim joined the EPP Group in the EP as the English language Press Spokesman. In 2000, he was appointed Group Policy Adviser to the Development & Co-operation Committee and the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. In 2004, Tim moved to the new Political Strategy Unit and, in 2007, he also joined the Plenary Sessions and Legislative Coordination Unit. He was responsible for developing the Group’s links with external organisations involved in policy-making. He worked closely with the European Ideas Network on drafting briefing papers and on various strategic issues. He was deeply involved in group legislative and election planning, and was tasked with monitoring the EP’s Conference of Committee Chairmen.
At the start of his career in 1985, Tim was Research Assistant to three UK Members of Parliament, including the British Minister for Europe Baroness Chalker of Wallasey: he worked in the House of Commons while studying at the London School of Economics. Awarded a Peter Kirk scholarship, Tim published in 1987 a timely analysis of EU free ports that was widely reviewed in both specialist and national media, forming the basis of a British parliamentary campaign supported by Lord Alton of Liverpool. Tim went on to be the first European Movement UK Press and Parliamentary Officer in London: seconded to work for the former British Prime Minister, Sir Edward Heath. In 1990, he was recruited by Japan’s Fujisankei Communications Group as the Japan Art Association’s European Press Officer. In 1993, Tim became an Investment Analyst for Charterhouse Tilney Securities Ltd covering food manufacturers, brewers and distillers—before being invited to work in Brussels for the EPP Group.
Alongside professional responsibilities, Tim has provided pro bono advice to charities and voluntary organisations – including to the Steering Group of the Brussels-based Pro Europa, the LARG Liverpool Afghan Resettlement Group, and the LEF Liverpool European Festival.
Peter Brock
Peter Brock is an independent Family Office Services Consultant and long-standing Chairman of the Investment Committee of a large Swiss Single Family Office. He is also the Chair of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft Düsseldorf e.V.
Peter co-founded and is Managing Partner of BeeWyzer GmbH (www.beewyzer.com), an Online Video Training Masterclass for NextGens of entrepreneurial families of wealth, covering family governance and wealth structuring.
Also, Peter works in the impact investing space advising family offices to execute sustainable investment strategies in all asset classes. He is co-founder of the federal German initiative for impact investing (Working group “Family Offices”) and Managing Director of The Impact Investing Magazin (www.impactinvestings.de). Also, he is mentor for impact startup accelerators Anthropia / Impact Factory of the Haniel family, at BRYCK (accelerator of the RAG-Stiftung), at Phineo Startups and also at the impact venture fund Revent Ventures.
His expertise lies in advising entrepreneurial families in setting up a family office for holistic wealth structuring solutions, family governance and succession issues as well as M&A advisory assisting family investors in direct investment projects and impact investing.
From 2019 to 2022 Peter was Managing Director setting up the impact investing multi family office 4L Capital AG and Investment Director at the single family office 4L Vision GmbH.
Until 2018 Peter Brock was Executive Director and Leader Family Office Services in EMEIA/GSA at EY (Ernst & Young). Since over 25 years he works in Investment Banking / SME Corporate Finance transactions and in Private Banking initially at Deloitte and the WestLB Group in London, then HSBC Trinkaus and Sal. Oppenheim, prior to EY.
Dr Birgit Bujard
Dr Birgit Bujard is a political scientist and Executive Manager of the Institute for Political Science and European Affairs at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on British politics and EU-UK relations.
She is also Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Turkey and European Union studies (CETEUS) and member of the Team Europe Direct, the speakers pool of the European Commission.
Since 2018 she is on the board of the Young Königswinter Alumni Association (YKWA e.V.), first as Deputy Chair and now as Chair. She attended the Young Königswinter Conference in 2011.
Neelam Cartmell
Neelam Cartmell, a British national, was born and raised in Germany before moving to the UK for the remainder of her late teens and early twenties. Over the past 20 years, she has worked in London, Paris, and Brussels and is now back in Berlin to help launch a new venture by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Her expertise spans politics, government affairs, communications, and sales.
Passionate about maintaining her connection to Germany and her native language, Neelam has founded and led German Language and Culture Clubs at her workplaces, such as the Bank of England and Politico Europe. Outside of work, she enjoys dancing, traveling, organizing, personal finance, politics, and spending time with family and friends.
John Kampfner
John Kampfner has had a long career in public life spanning global affairs, politics and culture. He is the author of seven books and is working on his eighth.
He began his journalistic career with the Telegraph, first in East Berlin where he reported on the fall of the Wall and German unification, then in Moscow during the collapse of Soviet Communism. He went on to work for the FT and BBC covering UK politics. As Editor of the New Statesman from 2005 to 2008, he took the magazine to 30-year circulation highs.
He writes regular columns for the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Politico and Der Spiegel. He is a regular contributor on broadcast media. He has a weekly Substack column, in which he analyses the state of Germany and the world.
His most recent book, ‘In Search of Berlin’, was published in 2023. He has made many programmes for BBC TV and radio, including a two-parter called ‘The Ugly War’ on the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2002, for which he was awarded Film of the Year and Journalist of the Year.
He is a Board member of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft and Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. In 2021, he set up the UK in the World programme at Chatham House, becoming its first director. He ran the free expression organisation, Index on Censorship, between 2008 and 2011; he subsequently advised Google on these issues. He was on the Council of King’s College London between 2012 and 2015 and Chair of the Clore Social Leadership programme from 2015 to 2018.
For eight years, from 2008 to 2016, he was founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, establishing one of the UK’s most successful art galleries. He was the founder of the Creative Industries Federation. He is now Chair of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in London.
Anne Ruth Herkes, State Secretary ret., Ambassador ret.
Following a long career in the public service, most recently as Ambassador and then State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Economics, Herkes has been a Non Executive Director on supervisory boards in in Europe and North America since 2014. She also held advisory roles in the tech startup industry and geopolitical consultancies, most recently with the Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington D.C.. Her board roles span across private banking in Europe, and the private equity industry in North America. She previously was a non executive director on the Supervisory Board of KFW IPEX Bank in Frankfurt.
She is Officier of the Légion d’Honneur, a member of Atlantik-Brücke and serves on the Advisory Board of Asia House London, as well as the transatlantic non-profit organisation 1014 Inc. – Space for Ideas, founded by the Federal Republic of Germany to promote transatlantic dialogue in the arts, society and cultural industry. She was also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alfred Herrhausen Society, the former International Forum of Deutsche Bank.
From 2002 to 2006, Herkes was head of the Economic Department at the German Embassy in London. Prior to that she held roles at the diplomatic missions in Washington and Tokyo, and at the German OSCE mission in Vienna. From 2006 to 2009 she was a member of the management board of bp p.l.c. biofuels business in London, as Vice President Policy & Communication and Senior Strategy Advisor, jointly responsible for the development of the biofuels division. From 2002 onwards for nearly a decade she called London her home.
She graduated from Freie Universität Berlin, and holds an ‚Erstes Staatsexamen‘ in Romanistik and Political Science, preceded by an undergraduate education at the London School of Economics and Sciences Po Paris with a scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. She completed postgraduate studies at the BSL Lausanne Business School and INSEAD/Fontainebleau.
Mari Mittelhaus
Mari Mittelhaus is the Executive Director and a board member of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft e.V. (DBG), where she has worked since 2018. The DBG is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental and politically independent registered association. Its aim is to promote German-British relations in all areas of public and cultural interest.
Mari is responsible for organising the DBG’s four Königswinter Conferences, as well as a public lecture programme, administering the membership base and the network of German-British Associations in Germany. As a graduate of Humboldt University’s Master in British Studies, fostering German-British relations has been important for her for a long time. Having lived in the UK and the US, building bridges between societies through exchange and culture is both a professional and a personal passion of hers. Mari has an interdisciplinary background in business, event management and English politics, law, literature and culture.
She has organised the Young Königswinter Conference for 8 years and also sits on the board of the Young Königswinter Alumni Organisation.
Graham Ziegner
Graham Ziegner heads the EU Member States (North and West) Unit in the International Strategy and Trade Relations Directorate of the UK Department for Business and Trade. Between 2016-2022, Graham headed the Multilateral Trade and G7/G20 Team in the Department for International Trade, leading the Department’s work on the UK’s G7 Presidency in 2021 and WTO Reform.
He has previously held Strategy and EU-focused roles at the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills and UK Trade & Investment. Before joining the UK Civil Service, Graham worked for both the House of Commons, as Deputy UK National Parliament Representative to the EU, and the House of Lords, as Advisor to the EU Sub-Committee on External Affairs.
He edited a book entitled British Diplomacy: Foreign Secretaries Reflect (Politico’s, 2007) and is a graduate of the LSE and the University of Oxford.
The following people are part of the Selection Committee that will choose the participants of the 2025 Young Königswinter Conference:
Tim Beyer Helm
Timothy Beyer Helm is on sabbatical from the European Parliament. Tim was elected Chair of the EMM European Movement Merseyside in 2017, and is Co-Founder of the Liverpool-based WWW WorldWide Wednesday network and YouTube channel. He is an elected individual member of the EPP’s WMCES Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies general assembly since October 2010. Tim completed his term of office as a Director of the New Europeans Association in 2019 and then became an elected member of the EM European Movement UK NC National Council. In June 2013, Tim joined the Executive Committee of the independent educational foundation, The European Atlantic Movement (TEAM Global).
In June 2010, Tim was appointed an adviser on transatlantic relations and outreach in the cabinet of the Secretary General of the European Parliament (EP). He was also a member of the Strategic Planning Team. Tim previously served as Special Adviser to EP Vice-President Edward McMillan-Scott MEP.
In September 1995, Tim joined the EPP Group in the EP as the English language Press Spokesman. In 2000, he was appointed Group Policy Adviser to the Development & Co-operation Committee and the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. In 2004, Tim moved to the new Political Strategy Unit and, in 2007, he also joined the Plenary Sessions and Legislative Coordination Unit. He was responsible for developing the Group’s links with external organisations involved in policy-making. He worked closely with the European Ideas Network on drafting briefing papers and on various strategic issues. He was deeply involved in group legislative and election planning, and was tasked with monitoring the EP’s Conference of Committee Chairmen.
At the start of his career in 1985, Tim was Research Assistant to three UK Members of Parliament, including the British Minister for Europe Baroness Chalker of Wallasey: he worked in the House of Commons while studying at the London School of Economics. Awarded a Peter Kirk scholarship, Tim published in 1987 a timely analysis of EU free ports that was widely reviewed in both specialist and national media, forming the basis of a British parliamentary campaign supported by Lord Alton of Liverpool. Tim went on to be the first European Movement UK Press and Parliamentary Officer in London: seconded to work for the former British Prime Minister, Sir Edward Heath. In 1990, he was recruited by Japan’s Fujisankei Communications Group as the Japan Art Association’s European Press Officer. In 1993, Tim became an Investment Analyst for Charterhouse Tilney Securities Ltd covering food manufacturers, brewers and distillers—before being invited to work in Brussels for the EPP Group.
Alongside professional responsibilities, Tim has provided pro bono advice to charities and voluntary organisations – including to the Steering Group of the Brussels-based Pro Europa, the LARG Liverpool Afghan Resettlement Group, and the LEF Liverpool European Festival.
Peter Brock is an independent Family Office Services Consultant and long-standing Chairman of the Investment Committee of a large Swiss Single Family Office. He is also the Chair of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft Düsseldorf e.V.
Peter co-founded and is Managing Partner of BeeWyzer GmbH (www.beewyzer.com), an Online Video Training Masterclass for NextGens of entrepreneurial families of wealth, covering family governance and wealth structuring.
Also, Peter works in the impact investing space advising family offices to execute sustainable investment strategies in all asset classes. He is co-founder of the federal German initiative for impact investing (Working group “Family Offices”) and Managing Director of The Impact Investing Magazin (www.impactinvestings.de). Also, he is mentor for impact startup accelerators Anthropia / Impact Factory of the Haniel family, at BRYCK (accelerator of the RAG-Stiftung), at Phineo Startups and also at the impact venture fund Revent Ventures.
His expertise lies in advising entrepreneurial families in setting up a family office for holistic wealth structuring solutions, family governance and succession issues as well as M&A advisory assisting family investors in direct investment projects and impact investing.
From 2019 to 2022 Peter was Managing Director setting up the impact investing multi family office 4L Capital AG and Investment Director at the single family office 4L Vision GmbH.
Until 2018 Peter Brock was Executive Director and Leader Family Office Services in EMEIA/GSA at EY (Ernst & Young). Since over 25 years he works in Investment Banking / SME Corporate Finance transactions and in Private Banking initially at Deloitte and the WestLB Group in London, then HSBC Trinkaus and Sal. Oppenheim, prior to EY.
Dr Birgit Bujard is a political scientist and Executive Manager of the Institute for Political Science and European Affairs at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on British politics and EU-UK relations.
She is also Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Turkey and European Union studies (CETEUS) and member of the Team Europe Direct, the speakers pool of the European Commission.
Since 2018 she is on the board of the Young Königswinter Alumni Association (YKWA e.V.), first as Deputy Chair and now as Chair. She attended the Young Königswinter Conference in 2011.
Neelam Cartmell, a British national, was born and raised in Germany before moving to the UK for the remainder of her late teens and early twenties. Over the past 20 years, she has worked in London, Paris, and Brussels and is now back in Berlin to help launch a new venture by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Her expertise spans politics, government affairs, communications, and sales.
Passionate about maintaining her connection to Germany and her native language, Neelam has founded and led German Language and Culture Clubs at her workplaces, such as the Bank of England and Politico Europe. Outside of work, she enjoys dancing, traveling, organizing, personal finance, politics, and spending time with family and friends.
John Kampfner has had a long career in public life spanning global affairs, politics and culture. He is the author of seven books and is working on his eighth.
He began his journalistic career with the Telegraph, first in East Berlin where he reported on the fall of the Wall and German unification, then in Moscow during the collapse of Soviet Communism. He went on to work for the FT and BBC covering UK politics. As Editor of the New Statesman from 2005 to 2008, he took the magazine to 30-year circulation highs.
He writes regular columns for the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Politico and Der Spiegel. He is a regular contributor on broadcast media. He has a weekly Substack column, in which he analyses the state of Germany and the world.
His most recent book, ‘In Search of Berlin’, was published in 2023. He has made many programmes for BBC TV and radio, including a two-parter called ‘The Ugly War’ on the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2002, for which he was awarded Film of the Year and Journalist of the Year.
He is a Board member of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft and Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. In 2021, he set up the UK in the World programme at Chatham House, becoming its first director. He ran the free expression organisation, Index on Censorship, between 2008 and 2011; he subsequently advised Google on these issues. He was on the Council of King’s College London between 2012 and 2015 and Chair of the Clore Social Leadership programme from 2015 to 2018.
For eight years, from 2008 to 2016, he was founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, establishing one of the UK’s most successful art galleries. He was the founder of the Creative Industries Federation. He is now Chair of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in London.
Anne Ruth Herkes, State Secretary ret., Ambassador ret.
Following a long career in the public service, most recently as Ambassador and then State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Economics, Herkes has been a Non Executive Director on supervisory boards in in Europe and North America since 2014. She also held advisory roles in the tech startup industry and geopolitical consultancies, most recently with the Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington D.C.. Her board roles span across private banking in Europe, and the private equity industry in North America. She previously was a non executive director on the Supervisory Board of KFW IPEX Bank in Frankfurt.
She is Officier of the Légion d’Honneur, a member of Atlantik-Brücke and serves on the Advisory Board of Asia House London, as well as the transatlantic non-profit organisation 1014 Inc. – Space for Ideas, founded by the Federal Republic of Germany to promote transatlantic dialogue in the arts, society and cultural industry. She was also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alfred Herrhausen Society, the former International Forum of Deutsche Bank.
From 2002 to 2006, Herkes was head of the Economic Department at the German Embassy in London. Prior to that she held roles at the diplomatic missions in Washington and Tokyo, and at the German OSCE mission in Vienna. From 2006 to 2009 she was a member of the management board of bp p.l.c. biofuels business in London, as Vice President Policy & Communication and Senior Strategy Advisor, jointly responsible for the development of the biofuels division. From 2002 onwards for nearly a decade she called London her home.
She graduated from Freie Universität Berlin, and holds an ‚Erstes Staatsexamen‘ in Romanistik and Political Science, preceded by an undergraduate education at the London School of Economics and Sciences Po Paris with a scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. She completed postgraduate studies at the BSL Lausanne Business School and INSEAD/Fontainebleau.
Mari Mittelhaus is the Executive Director and a board member of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft e.V. (DBG), where she has worked since 2018. The DBG is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental and politically independent registered association. Its aim is to promote German-British relations in all areas of public and cultural interest.
Mari is responsible for organising the DBG’s four Königswinter Conferences, as well as a public lecture programme, administering the membership base and the network of German-British Associations in Germany. As a graduate of Humboldt University’s Master in British Studies, fostering German-British relations has been important for her for a long time. Having lived in the UK and the US, building bridges between societies through exchange and culture is both a professional and a personal passion of hers. Mari has an interdisciplinary background in business, event management and English politics, law, literature and culture.
She has organised the Young Königswinter Conference for 8 years and also sits on the board of the Young Königswinter Alumni Organisation.
Graham Ziegner
Graham Ziegner heads the EU Member States (North and West) Unit in the International Strategy and Trade Relations Directorate of the UK Department for Business and Trade. Between 2016-2022, Graham headed the Multilateral Trade and G7/G20 Team in the Department for International Trade, leading the Department’s work on the UK’s G7 Presidency in 2021 and WTO Reform.
He has previously held Strategy and EU-focused roles at the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills and UK Trade & Investment. Before joining the UK Civil Service, Graham worked for both the House of Commons, as Deputy UK National Parliament Representative to the EU, and the House of Lords, as Advisor to the EU Sub-Committee on External Affairs.
He edited a book entitled British Diplomacy: Foreign Secretaries Reflect (Politico’s, 2007) and is a graduate of the LSE and the University of Oxford.