Sir Jocelyn Stevens, who has died aged 82, forged a formidable reputation for himself as a saviour of ailing institutions, first in the newspaper industry and later as head, successively, of the Royal College of Art and English Heritage.

Stevens was at his best in a crisis, for his style of management was based less on his intellect than on the overpowering force of his personality. He carried with him an air of impatience and, though capable of great charm, he did not shy from ruthless, even brutal, behaviour where necessary. Private Eye christened him “Piranha Teeth”.

Indeed, at times there appeared to be no form of exercise that gave him greater pleasure than taking an axe to those he perceived as dead wood. Stevens was, par excellence, a sacker — he once dismissed 11 professors from the RCA in an afternoon — and there clustered about him a fund of oft-repeated stories about his towering rages.

Such was his reputation for belligerent cost-cutting that when he was appointed chairman of English Heritage in 1992, one commentator described it as “like putting Herod in charge of childcare”. It was an image in which, in public at least, Stevens revelled.

^{Sir Jocelyn Stevens at the The Crescent, Buxton (Paul Armiger)}

Rich from birth, Stevens had first come to prominence in 1957 when, as a 25th birthday present to himself, he bought Queen magazine. He proceeded to transform the staid fortnightly — founded by Mrs Beeton’s husband — into the house magazine of the Swinging Sixties, helped by contributions from his friends Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Mark Boxer, whom he employed as Queen’s art director.

In truth, in 10 years Stevens only managed to increase his publication’s circulation by 60,000, but such was his flair for publicity — much of it self-publicity — that he quadrupled Queen’s advertising revenue within two years. Stevens undoubtedly had a sharp eye for business opportunities, and in 1964 he became one of the principal backers of the pirate radio station Radio Caroline.

It was at Queen that he first began to acquire a reputation for insensitivity and tantrums. Among stories told about Stevens were the occasion when he sacked an underling over the tannoy, the time he threw the fashion editor’s filing cabinet out of a fourth floor window, and the day he cut short one of his reporters’ telephone calls by cutting the wire to their receiver.

Years later, one of his art directors still quailed at the memory of being picked up by Stevens and shaken like a rat by a terrier, while change from his pockets cascaded on to the floor.

In 1968, Stevens sold Queen and became personal assistant to the chairman of Beaverbrook Newspapers, Sir Max Aitken. “I hear young Stevens bites the carpet,” said Aitken of his protégé. “That’s no bad thing.” Stevens became a director of the Beaverbrook group in 1971, two years after he had been appointed managing director of the London Evening Standard. The Standard was then failing and Aitken’s brief to Stevens was terse: “Save it”.

Within three years Stevens had placed the newspaper on a sounder footing and was rewarded with the post of managing director of the Daily Express, the fortunes of which were also in long-term decline. Between 1972 and 1981 it was to lose a million readers and six editors; Stevens himself twice refused the editor’s job.

Though Stevens’s tenure coincided with the peak of print union truculence, his frank approach won their admiration, so much so that when he left the Express in 1974 he was “banged out”, the traditional send-off by printers for one of their own. By then he had persuaded them to accept the closure of the newspaper’s Scottish operations — with the loss of 1,800 jobs — and had transferred printing to Manchester without disruption.

Stevens became the managing director of Beaverbrook Newspapers in 1974, and continued as its deputy chairman when the group was bought out by Trafalgar House under Victor Matthews.

In 1979 he and Lord Matthews started the Daily Star, but they had different ideas about the future of what had become Express Newspapers, and in 1981 Stevens was sacked after he had told his chairman once too often what he thought of him. Many in the City suspected that Stevens hoped to buy the group himself, but he was never able to.

Having acquired a reputation as an ardent free marketeer, in 1984 Stevens was asked to enter the world of arts management and accepted appointment as Rector and Vice-Provost of the RCA. By the time he left eight years later, so had two-thirds of the staff, their 17 departments trimmed to four. But Stevens had also balanced the College’s books, introduced business sponsorship of students and increased the numbers applying to the RCA by 25 per cent.

Stevens was an equally unsympathetic but effective chairman of English Heritage. He was no philistine but nor was he a natural conserver of things, his instincts always favouring change. He presided over several well publicised sackings and rows — on one occasion ejecting the secretary of the Twentieth Century Society from his office with the words “Get out! And take that ghastly little man with you,” the latter being a highly respected city surveyor who had been left a hunchback after childhood polio.

But Stevens’s virtues included fighting tenaciously for causes he believed in, and at English Heritage he succeeded in keeping open more listed churches, presided over the restoration of the Albert Memorial and persuaded the Blair Government to improve the setting of Stonehenge by sinking the busy roads next to it. He retired in 2000.

Jocelyn Edward Greville Stevens was born on Valentine’s Day 1932. His mother, the daughter of the newspaper magnate Sir Edward Hulton, died shortly after giving birth to him.

Jocelyn’s father, Major Greville Stewart-Stevens, could never bring himself to forgive his son for the loss of his wife, and as a small boy Jocelyn was sent to live in his own flat in Marylebone, complete with a staff of cook, maid, priest and chauffeur — for the child’s Rolls-Royce.

His father afterwards remarried and Jocelyn grew up with his stepfamily in Scotland; his stepbrother, Blair (later Sir Blair) Stewart-Wilson, would became Master of the Queen’s Household.

Jocelyn was educated at Eton, where he reached the final of the Public Schools’ Boxing Championship. He then did his National Service in the Rifle Brigade; when, as a cadet, he won the Sword of Honour at Eaton Hall, his father declined to attend the passing-out parade.

Stevens went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he proved himself an accomplished oarsman but was sent down from the university for skipping tutorials to go skiing in Switzerland. Stevens had sent his tutor a postcard marked “Wish you were here”; from an early age he was no respecter of authority.

^{Sir Jocelyn Stevens with the sculpture of the Allied leaders on New Bond Street (Eddie Mulholland)}

On his 21st birthday, Stevens inherited a substantial fortune from his mother. He rapidly acquired a standing in the gossip columns, partly because he was regular escort of Princess Alexandra, partly because he had a predilection for driving sports cars into lamp-posts.

But Stevens had ambitions beyond being a playboy and, having put himself through a course at the London School of Printing, in 1955 he went to work as a journalist at Lilliput, a magazine owned by his uncle’s Hulton stable. Two years later he bought Queen.

Stevens was tall, jut-jawed and fearless. He was immensely hard-working and possessed great brio and vitality. He was also a generous giver of parties, notably in company with his consort for many years in later life, the heiress and philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield, one of the few people who could match him for wealth and temperament.

Though seemingly impervious to insult, Stevens was sensitive enough of his reputation to raid the libraries of newspapers he managed in order to confiscate the cuttings held on him. He also did much work for charity, spurred by the condition of his disabled son Rupert. He cared deeply for his family, and when his daughter Pandora fell prey to drugs, he broke down the door of her squat, carried her to hospital and had her dealer hunted down.

Jocelyn Stevens was appointed CVO in 1993 and knighted in 1996.

He married, in 1956 (dissolved 1979), Janie Sheffield, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. They had a son and two daughters. His son Rupert predeceased him. After he and Vivien Duffield separated, in 2008 he married Emma Cheape, daughter of the late Sir Iain Tennant.

Sir Jocelyn Stevens, born February 14 1932, died October 12 2014