Zewditu Gebreyohanes: Senior Researcher
Zewditu is a Senior Researcher at the Legatum Institute, Deputy Editor of the digital history publication History Reclaimed and a Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum. From May 2022 to November 2023 she was the director of Restore Trust, a grassroots member-led campaign founded in 2021 to return the National Trust to its statutory aims and charitable ethos.
Formerly Zewditu worked at the think tank Policy Exchange, where she was Head of the History Matters policy unit from 2021 to 2022. She co-authored a paper with historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts criticising Churchill College, Cambridge for its working group on ‘Churchill, Race and Empire’ and for its attempts to tarnish Sir Winston Churchill’s reputation and legacy: the group was disbanded within weeks of the report’s publication. Zewditu is a Young Ambassador of the International Churchill Society.
Other Policy Exchange reports by Zewditu included one on street-renaming legislation, in which she recommended that councils statutorily should be mandated to obtain supermajority support from residents and businesses on a street before they are allowed to rename it: a condition that had been removed for many councils. Zewditu’s recommendation was announced as forthcoming government policy in the 2022 Queen’s Speech.
Another paper, which Zewditu co-authored in 2021 with Ursula Buchan and Christopher Forsyth KC, criticised Kew Gardens for its “decolonisation” agenda. Kew Gardens abandoned this project within a fortnight of their paper’s publication.
From 2019 to 2020, Zewditu was an assistant to the late Prof. Sir Roger Scruton on the government commission on housing and architecture, ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’. She has been involved in the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation since its founding.
Zewditu graduated with a first-class BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from King’s College, London in 2020.
Being half-Ethiopian, Zewditu is familiar with the culture, history, politics and geography of the Horn of Africa. She is fluent in Amharic (the Ethiopian national language) and proficient in Tigrinya (the language of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, and the Eritrean national language).