FORMER London Mayor Ken Livingstone will be among a group of prominent speakers heading for Salisbury in March.

He joins Lord David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary; Terry Waite, the man taken hostage by Islamic Jihad in the 1980s; and Tony Little, the former headmaster of Eton in the line-up for the first Salisbury Journal Speakers' Festival.

The event takes place at two locations – The Salisbury Arts Centre and The Blackledge Theatre (Godolphin School) – on March 24 and 25.

Livingstone, a confidante of the Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, is the author of Being Red. He will be giving an insider’s account of the Party and its future, at a pivotal moment in its history.

There will be a question and answer session to follow this and all the other speakers.

Lord Owen, who authored Cabinet’s Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940, will give his account of the British War Cabinet meetings of May 1940. The minutes and documents reveal just how close Britain came to seeking a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany.

Little, who wrote An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education, argues that there is a crisis in the British education system. An obsession with measurement of the ‘easily-measurable’ misses the point of great education.

The two-day programme includes Lara Morgan, author of More Balls Than Most. Morgan was Founder and CEO of Pacific Direct which she started aged 23, a few years after her father was declared bankrupt, and which she later sold for £20 million.Also included is Alison Weir, author of Katherine of Aragon. Andrew Monaghan, The New Politics of Russia; Tom Bromley, The Secret Life of a Ghostwriter; John Andrews, The World in Conflict: Understanding The World’s Troublespots; Paul Beaver, Spitfire People: The Men and Women Who Made the Spitfire the Aviation Icon; Helen Rappaport, Caught In The Revolution; Petrograd, 1917; Diana Darke ,My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis; Sir Alan Munro, The Lighter Side of Diplomacy; Azi Ahmed , Worlds Apart: A Muslim Girl with the SAS.

Tickets available at salisburyjournalspeakersfestival.com