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Simon was a special advisor in the last Labour government, working in Downing Street for two chief whips, Hilary Armstrong MP and Jacqui Smith MP, who became the first female Home Secretary.
Simon Benson is a communications and government affairs director with 20 years’ experience advising CEOs, politicians, and external affairs teams. He specialises in c-suite strategic counsel, crisis and issues management, media training and public affairs.
Simon was a special advisor in the last Labour government, working in Downing Street for two chief whips, Hilary Armstrong MP and Jacqui Smith MP, who became the first female Home Secretary. There, Simon handled stakeholder engagement between the government and the Parliamentary Labour Party and its backbench MPs. He also helped break stories in the national media which were of strategic importance to the government.
Simon then enjoyed a ten-year career at an Omnicom agency, FH. His biggest achievement there was to help win and then run the Emirates account, which became the
largest in the agency. This was a mix of corporate and brand PR, as well as strategic public affairs advice on handling ad-hoc political issues in the UK. Other highlights included working for the Qatar Foundation’s WISE summit in Doha for two years in succession, creating and running the public affairs campaign for the Crick Institute in London on its inception, and media training the CEO and senior directors of the European Investment Fund in Luxembourg. Simon developed media training as a speciality, training senior officers for the United Nations in Geneva, the country managers for Huawei in Paris and Madrid, and Emerson in the UK and Brussels.
Simon also worked on crisis and issues for Emirates in the UK (in-flight incidents, political/media issues) Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Denmark (advice and training ahead of their attendance at an important hearing of the FDA in the USA) and for the Cruise Line International Association in London (ahead of their global conference celebrating cruise line safety which was being held in the week when the Costa Concordia sunk).
Simon has also focused on private work under the Reputation Global and Rep PR brands, which included launching a campaign against the restructuring of junior doctors’ contracts, a crisis salvage operation for the CEO of a major infrastructure company who had misspoken on social media, and collaborations with other strategic communications advisors. One of these was with Hillcress, where Simon advised the political office of the Romanian Prime Minister when that country had the EC presidency; helped a high-net-worth individual navigate political attacks in central Europe and launched a national government-funded public health scheme to reduce the problem of knife crime.
With his friends at AEQ, Simon has helped launch the Kigali International Finance Centre (KIFC), a new IFC for Africa and provides strategic communications support to the prominent British designer, Thomas Heatherwick, which included a full-page interview with him in the Sunday Telegraph. Simon also supported an NGO with their campaign in favour of the import of second-hand clothes into Africa, with the creation of the Mitumba Institute and Research Centre think-tank, which
saw him visit Zimbabwe and Malawi last year.
Outside of his day to day work, Simon is a also a member of the specialist panel for issues and crisis support agency River Effra, where he is available to give high-level strategic counsel in response to major corporate challenges.
Simon brings over 20 years’ of experience to Reputation Global and is thrilled to be working with Anil Bungar and the team on providing high level advice to senior leaders around the world.