Tom Clark was Editor of Prospect, a leading current affairs magazine which specialises in in-depth pieces on ideas and public policy. He was also previously chair of the editorial board at The Guardian and would write 'the Guardian view' on UK politics, and before that, on social policy and economics. He also ran the paper’s opinion polling and presented its Politics Weekly podcast.

Away from journalism, Tom takes a keen interest in social science and produced the 2015 book Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath (Yale University Press), together with the sociologist and emeritus Nuffield College Fellow, Anthony Heath. He previously collaborated with Harvard's Robert D Putnam in writing The Age of Obama, a comparative study on immigration and diversity on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Tom sits on various university committees and steering groups, including at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE, and has in the past taught economics at University College, London. Earlier on in his career, he worked as a Special Adviser to two Secretaries of State in two Whitehall departments, and before that begun his career as an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.