Newsquest

Newsquest is the third largest publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom with 300 titles in its portfolio. Based in Weybridge, Surrey, Newsquest employs a total of more than 5,500 people across the UK. It also has a specialist arm that publishes both commercial and business to business (B2B) titles such as Insurance Times, The Strad, and Boxing News.

History

Newsquest was founded in 1995 when US private equity partnership Kohlberg Kravis Roberts financed a £210 million management buy-out of the Reed Regional Newspapers group of British papers from Reed Elsevier.

In 1996 Newsquest swapped its Yorkshire titles for Johnston Press’s Bury, Lancashire area titles and £9.25 million, sold some of its titles in the English Midlands to Midland Independent Newspapers and bought the Westminster Press local newspapers group for £12.3 million from Pearson, owner of Penguin Books and the Financial Times, resulting in Newsquest doubling in size. The next year it floated on the London Stock Exchange realising a market capitalisation of £500 million. In 1998, Newsquest added the Sussex-based Contact-a-Car, the London Property Weekly titles, two titles in the North West of England, and three Review Group titles in Hertfordshire.

Gordon Brown

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007. Brown was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1983 to 2015, first for Dunfermline East and later for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

A doctoral graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Brown spent his early career working as both a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He entered Parliament in 1983 as the MP for Dunfermline East. He joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1989 as Shadow Secretary of State for Trade, and was later promoted to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1992. After Labour's victory in 1997, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, becoming the longest-serving holder of that office in modern history.

Brown's time as Chancellor was marked by major reform of Britain's monetary and fiscal policy architecture, transferring interest rate setting powers to the Bank of England, by a wide extension of the powers of the Treasury to cover much domestic policy and by transferring responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority. Controversial moves included the abolition of advance corporation tax (ACT) relief in his first budget, and the removal in his final budget of the 10% "starting rate" of personal income tax which he had introduced in 1999. In 2007, Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister and Labour Leader and Brown was chosen to replace him in an uncontested election.