Matthew Barzun in line to be new US ambassador to London - The Guardian

Washington is due to nominate the head of finance of Barack Obama's re-election campaign, Matthew Barzun, as the new US ambassador to London, according to diplomatic sources.

Barzun's nomination has been delayed by the general backlog of personnel appointments at the state department as it looks around for new faces to fill critical roles in Obama's second administration, but it is said now to be imminent.

Barzun, 42, is a Kentucky-based businessman who was made ambassador to Sweden in 2009 in recognition of his work on the 2008 Obama campaign, where he won praise for amassing large numbers of small scale contributors. But he was called back to the US two years later to lead the fundraising drive for the 2012 campaign, the most expensive in US history. The campaign Barzun ran raised $730m (£470m).

He can trace his lineage back to America's first English settlers. Matthew Winthrop Barzun is named after the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, who is an ancestor according to the Boston Globe.

His grandfather, Jacques Barzun, was a French-born cultural historian and philosopher, who died last year, aged 104.

At the US embassy and at the grandiose official residence, Winfield House, Barzun's arrival represents a generational change. His predecessor, Louis Susman, is 75, and his predecessor, Robert Tuttle, was 61 when he took up the post.

During his time in Stockholm, Barzun won friends in the media and culture world by hosting a series of contemporary art and music evening, including a live performance by Will Oldham, the singer-songwriter known as Bonnie Prince Billy, who was a friend of the family.

"He was good at actively promoting US culture, but not doing it in the old-school way with big black tie receptions, but hosting informal evenings and inviting the hipster artistic crowd," said Johan Wirfält, opinion editor on the website of Swedish TV channel SVT.

Barzun beat Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue magazine, for the nomination. She has since been made artistic director of Condé Nast, Vogue's parent company.