British Airways’ Director of Communications Simon Walker is to take a two-year secondment from the company to take up the position of Communications Secretary at Buckingham Palace.

He will be on secondment from the airline for the period, which will cover the Queens’ Golden Jubilee year of 2002.

Simon Walker, aged 47, has been on the staff of British Airways since the beginning of 1998. He was previously a partner at the Brunswick Group where he worked on British Airways issues. He was seconded from Brunswick to the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at No 10 Downing Street from 1996-97.

He was born in South Africa and has worked as a journalist and consultant in New Zealand, Belgium and the United Kingdom. He read politics, philosophy and economics at Balliol College, Oxford where he was President of the Oxford Union, and he was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He is married with two children (girl and boy aged 8 and 14).

Mr Walker will take up his new role at the end of September 2000.

Simon Walker said: “I am tremendously excited and looking forward to taking up this new post. Working in British Airways is one of the most interesting and stimulating jobs in my career and I will miss the Company over the next two years. But I am delighted to have been offered this new opportunity and am looking forward to the challenges which lie ahead.”

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