Ebullient editor of the Daily Star, Sunday Express and National Enquirer who helped find the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs
Brian Hitchen, who has died aged 77, along with his wife, Nelli, after being struck by a car in Spain, was one of old Fleet Street's great characters. He spent seven years from 1987 as editor of the Daily Star and a further year editing the Sunday Express. Long before those editorships, he had won a reputation for being a tough news editor with an uncompromising desire for journalistic scoops. He was not above pulling the occasional stunt in order to ensure that he, or his staff, beat rivals to the story. All is fair, Hitchen liked to say, in love and journalism.
His stories tended to grow with the telling. Did he really take a trip to the Arctic circle to find a Yorkshireman who was said be living with Eskimos? It was a tale he loved to recount. Hitchen was also renowned for nurturing young reporting talent and for his sense of humour, most usually evidenced by his trademark belly laugh. Of pronounced rightwing views, he wrote a column in the Star that outraged Labour voters, liberals – who earned his particular scorn – and even some Tories. It went down well with readers, however.
I recall attending a special press conference for editors at South Africa House in the late 1980s in which the country's prime minister, FW de Klerk, gave the first hints that he was thinking of releasing Nelson Mandela. After some sympathetic questions from a couple of editors, Hitchen sprang to his feet to ask why the South African government should think of freeing a terrorist rather than negotiating a deal with the Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who had split from the ANC and was generally regarded as an apartheid government collaborator. De Klerk was lost for words for a moment. He had not expected a British editor to be even more trenchantly anti-ANC than he was himself.
Perhaps it was no surprise that Hitchen had already won the nickname Benito, partly because he was supposed to resemble Mussolini and partly because of his politics. Always impeccably dressed, usually sporting red braces, he had a penchant for smoking big cigars that made him look like one his political heroes, Winston Churchill, rather than Mussolini.
Born in Chadderton, Lancashire, Hitchen started his career in journalism as a copy boy with local newspapers in the 1950s. This was followed by a spell of national service in the army. His national newspaper career began in Manchester, at the Daily Mirror. His reporting skills led to him being promoted to the Mirror's New York bureau, where he covered the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Hitchen returned to London in 1972, working on the news desk for a couple of years until he joined the Daily Express as a middle-ranking news executive.
In that role he masterminded one of the paper's greatest exclusives, the discovery that the Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs was living free in Brazil. Hitchen then went off to work for the National Enquirer in Florida, in the company of several British tabloid journalists. One of them, working to Hitchen's brief, obtained a sneak picture of Elvis Presley lying dead in his coffin. The Enquirer's scoop boosted its sales to 6.5m. As Hitchen was heard to say ever after: "It was the biggest rise in circulation of any publication anywhere in the world."
When Hitchen returned to London he became London editor of the Daily Star from 1981 to 1986, which was then produced in Manchester. In 1987, with the headquarters having moved to London, the then proprietor, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, unwisely went into partnership with the owner of the Sunday Sport, David Sullivan. They installed Mike Gabbert as editor and he introduced quasi-pornographic Sport-like editorial content. Circulation dropped immediately and so precipitously that Stevens pulled out of the deal and called on Hitchen to save the paper.
As Star editor for the next seven years he managed to reverse the downward slide and eventually secured the Star's highest regular sales, sometimes nudging 2m an issue. His unwanted reward in 1994 was the editorship of the Sunday Express, where he spent only a year.
In 1996, he set up his own company, Brian Hitchen Communications, and also became chairman of two Irish publications, Kerry Life and Irish Country Life. He had long had a love for Ireland, having married a Kildare woman, Ellen O'Hanlon, who was always known as Nelli, in 1962.
Hitchen continued to take a close interest in what was happening to newspapers. In a wide-ranging interview with Press Gazette a year ago, he raged against phone hacking, saying he was angry and disgusted by the affair. "Their crass stupidity has handed the keys to those wanting to shackle the press," he said.
He and Nelli are survived by their daughter, Claire, and son, Alexander, who is photo chief at the New York Daily News.
• Brian Hitchen, journalist, born 8 July 1936; died 2 December 2013