Hutton, Will(iam) Nicholas (1950– )

English editor and writer on political and economic issues. Hutton joined The Guardian as economics editor in 1990, and was appointed assistant editor in 1995. He moved to The Observer in 1996, becoming editor-in-chief in 1998. In 2000, following his appointment as chief executive at the Industrial Society, the UK's largest training organization, he stepped down from The Observer and the board of Guardian Media Group, but remained a contributing editor and leading columnist. He is widely credited as the originator of UK prime minister Tony Blair's ‘stakeholder’ economy concept: that the individual ought to have a stake or an investment in all aspects of society.

Initially a senior producer and editor for the Radio 4 current affairs programme The Financial World Tonight from 1978 to 1981, Hutton was a director and producer of The Money Programme for BBC2 (1981–83). He was economics correspondent for Newsnight and a reporter for Panorama between 1983 and 1988, and in 1988 became editor of the European Business Channel. After writing The Revolution That Never Was: An Assessment of Keynesian Economics (1986), Hutton published The State We're In in 1995 – a challenge to the economic status quo in the UK, and a virulent attack on the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s – which was later serialized by Channel 4. He championed the concept of stakeholder capitalism, balancing the interests of customers, shareholders and workers. In The State to Come (1997) Hutton attacked globalization and outlined policies to minimize the social risks of a free market (itself identified as a shift of power to employers and a sharp increase in inequality).

Hutton was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, before graduating from Bristol University with a BsocSc, and from INSEAD, Fontainebleau, with an MBA. He began his career as a stockbroker with Phillips & Drew in 1971 before joining the BBC in 1977. Hutton was nominated Political Journalist of the Year in 1993 by Granada TV's What The Papers Say for his coverage of the 1992 Black Wednesday economic crisis.