George Pitcher

George Pitcher is a journalist, author and an Anglican priest. He was most recently Editor-in-Chief of International Business Times UK, Associate Editor at Newsweek Europe and head of its editorial panel, positions he quit after his 60th birthday in 2015. He co-founded Jericho Chambers, a radical development of communications consultancy modelled on a set of legal chambers, with Robert Phillips, a former CEO at Edelman, in June 2013. Previously, he was appointed Secretary for Public Affairs to the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 2010 and left the post a year later. He was Religion Editor of Telegraph Media from May 2008 and wrote a regular column and occasional leaders for the Daily Telegraph and a contentious blog for telegraph.co.uk. He left the paper in June 2010, six weeks after editor-in-chief Will Lewis abruptly departed after a strategic disagreement.

He was Industrial Editor of The Observer between 1988 and 1991, during which his commentary on the high summer of Thatcherite utility privatisation led to the Industrial Society (the precursor to the Work Foundation) voting him National Newspaper Industrial Journalist of the Year in 1991.

In 1992, he co-founded the communications consultancy Luther Pendragon with Charles Stewart-Smith, the television journalist. The firm grew through the 1990s off the back of major and often controversial clients such as British Gas, Kimberly Clark, Holocaust Memorial Day and the Hinduja family.

Luther Pendragon lays claim to having developed the professional practice of issues management, but this is disputed in the PR industry. In 2005, the firm was subject to a management buy-out, said to be worth £11 million by the trade magazine PR Week.

Pitcher had undertaken training for ordained ministry in the Church of England and was ordained curate of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London – known as "the journalists' church". He was Associate Priest at St Bride's from 2008 to 2012. He was licensed as Priest-in-Charge to the Parish of Waldron in East Sussex in 2013, where he is currently Rector. He is a regular broadcaster on religious matters and has organised topical debates in churches. Since 2006 he co-organised Christmas benefit concerts for churches and cathedrals with Ian Anderson of Seventies supergroup Jethro Tull.

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