Stuart Kuttner

Stuart Kuttner has been around the block in Fleet Street.  During his time as a reporter and news editor with both the Evening Standard and Evening News in London, he developed his investigative approach. In 1975, for the Standard, he secured a big interview with Prince Charles, then just 27.  He was on the Evening News in 1977 when Andrew "Gino" Newton came out of prison (for offences associated with shooting Norman Scott's dog, Rinka) and had the inside track when Jeremy Thorpe went on trial for conspiracy and incitement to murder Scott the following year. Thorpe was cleared.

Private Eye took against Kuttner in 1980, describing him as "sinister and serpentine".  They said he had "an obsession with the exposure of sexual deviants". And, when he left the Evening News for the News of The World that year, they talked about his "Pandora's box of bugging devices".   Mobile phones as we know them didn't hit the UK until 1985.

Kuttner has always been fiercely loyal. This a quote from a feature in Press Gazette, in 2005, when the News of the World had won Newspaper of The Year, under Andy Coulson. "Popular journalism is at the very heart of our society. Snooty, sneering editors with circulations they should be ashamed of could learn a great deal from the News of the World. I have spent much of my life in Fleet Street. Of course we are not perfect, but the team which comprises this newspaper is in my view the most skilled, tenacious and professional band in the whole of the industry."