White leaves NoW to work on Nazi novel

News of the World US editor Stuart White has left the paper after 20 years, nine of them as its correspondent in Los Angeles.

White has sold a movie script to a Hollywood company and is working on a novel set in the dying days of the Third Reich. He told Press Gazette: “I’ve had a marvellously exciting career spanning more than 40 years, and now I think it is time to move on.”

Once described in Press Gazette by the then NoW editor Piers Morgan as “the best reporter in Fleet Street” for his coverage of both the Lady Buck scandal and the Alan Clark “beds the Harkness women” saga, White was NoW chief feature writer before being sent to LA in 1994.

He was the “man in the hotel room” with the naked House of Commons call girl Pamela Bordes in the 1988 exposÃ©. White also covered the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Rwanda, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Divine Brown/Hugh Grant story, the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal and the September 11 attacks on the US.

“I’ve been shot at, shelled, beaten up, arrested, deported and had my life threatened,” said White. “It’s been as dramatic and exciting as I ever dreamed it could be when I first wanted to be a reporter.”

White began his career on the St Helen’s Reporter and after brief spells on the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and Reading Evening Post, went to Fleet Street to work for the Evening News in 1969. He then joined the Daily Sketch, UPI and The Sun before first joining the News of the World. He worked in Hong Kong for the China Mail and The Star.