Michael George Andrew Axworthy (26 September 1962 – 16 March 2019) was an English academic, author, and commentator. He was the head of the Iran section at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office between 1998 and 2000.

Michael Axworthy was born in Woking on 26 September 1962. He spent his childhood in West Kirby, Radyr, Ilkley and Chester, where he attended The King's School.

Axworthy visited Iran frequently during holidays as a teenager because his father, Ifor, was involved in a project there with the Midland Bank. He recalled leaving the capital, Tehran, around September 1978 soon after the first large demonstrations against the soon-to-be-deposed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had taken place in the city.

While studying history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the 1980s, Axworthy was greatly influenced by historians and other academics with interests in the history of ideas, such as Tim Blanning, Maurice Cowling, and Martin Golding. He graduated with a BA degree in 1985 and was awarded an MA in 2002.

He lived with his wife, Sally (née Hinds), whom he married in 1996, at Morwenstow, Cornwall. He died of cancer at his house in Rome on 16 March 2019 and was survived by his son and three daughters.

An inability to get a grant to study for a Ph.D. led Axworthy to apply for work at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), a department of the UK government where he thought he would be able to indulge in his desire for a challenging job that involved living abroad. He stayed with the FCO until 2005, and was its Head of Iran Section in Tehran between 1998 and 2000 after spells working in Germany and Malta.

Axworthy took leave from the FCO in 2000 and in 2005 he resigned his position. He later said:

I thought that the FCO would be challenging, and I liked the idea of living abroad. I was right about that — but the FCO also taught me how to write, which was a bonus. But ultimately I wanted to write books, and I was never entirely at ease in a large, hierarchical organisation.