12 Facts About Les Hinton

Leslie Frank Hinton was born on 19 February 1944 and is a British-American journalist, writer and business executive whose career with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation spanned more than fifty years.

Les Hinton, the son of a British Army chef and a seamstress, was born in the docklands of Bootle, a working-class area of Lancashire, now Merseyside.

Les Hinton travelled with his family as his father was posted around the world, attending Army schools in Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Germany, and Singapore, as well as Liverpool.

Les Hinton had little formal education after failing his Eleven-plus, and left his Liverpool school in 1959, aged 15.

Except for a few years in London in the 1960s, Les Hinton spent his entire career with Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation.

Les Hinton began work as a copy boy in 1959 at the Adelaide News in South Australia, where 28-year-old Murdoch was managing director.

Les Hinton later worked as associate editor of the Boston Herald and editor-in-chief of Star.

In 1990, Les Hinton became president of Murdoch Magazines and then president and chief executive officer of News America Publishing, responsible for the company's US publishing operations.

Les Hinton returned to London in 1995 as executive chairman of News Corp subsidiary News International, publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times Educational Supplement and the now defunct titles Today and The News of the World where he stayed for eleven years.

Les Hinton was definitely around when it was going on.

On 14 September 2016, Parliament's ethics committee, the Committee of Privileges, published its own report exonerating Les Hinton and refuting the original Whittingdale report.

The Committee of Privileges stated that the evidence had failed to: "meet the standard of proof" required by Parliament and went on to conclude: "there is no evidence that [Les Hinton] misled the [Culture, Media and Sport] Committee".