Party for FT’s new DC bureau chief

Betsy Rothstein of Fishbowl DC writes Saturday about the party held for the Financial Times‘ new Washington bureau chief, Richard McGregor.

Rothstein writes, “The new bureau chief has a confident quietness. He’s neither the life of the party nor the wallflower. He isn’t full of thick Washington conceit, but he isn’t confused by what he was sent here to do. ‘Just get everybody facing in the right direction and let them go,’ he says in his native Australian accent.

“Radical change is not on his spoken agenda. ‘I’m building on the good legacy that [already exists],’ he says. ‘No big changes.’ Like Norquist, McGregor has a trick phrase up his sleeve. ‘I don’t have to come here and boot people up the bum.’  A quick translation: ‘I don’t have to come here and push.’

“Asked about the newspaper being a perceived pink, McGregor remarked, ‘I think of it as salmon.’

“Born in Sydney, Australia, he worked for The Australian, the International Herald Tribune, the BBC and Far Eastern Economic Review and has spent much of the last decade in China as FT‘s Bureau Chief.  Washington is three months new, but so is America. ‘I have wanted to come to the states all my life,’ he says. He’s living in Chinatown while he house hunts.”

Read more here.