The world class schmoozer who bewitched three Prime Ministers
. . . and Rupert Murdoch. The extraordinary rise of the tugboat crewman’s daughter from Warrington
APART from her devoted husband and Rupert Murdoch, it will be those members of the fashionable Chipping Norton Set who once mingled with her at weekend parties who’ll be most delighted by her acquittal.
These rich and well- connected folk, of course, include David Cameron, whose constituency nestles in these affluent acres of Oxfordshire.
Indeed, it is deeply ironic that some of these national figures were being targeted by reporters working for Rebekah Brooks as they tried to dig up scandalous stories to splash across the front pages of her red-top tabloid newspapers, the News Of The World and The Sun.
How ironic, too, that she herself indulged in a pampered lifestyle that was utterly unlike those l ed by her papers’ working- class readers but which was on a par with those millionaire celebrities.
With her Old Etonian husband Charlie, she attended Royal Ascot, dined at the most expensive London restaurants, took a helicopter to the Glastonbury Festival and a private plane for supper in Venice.
In those days, newspaper staff, over whom she presided like a latter-day Marie Antoinette, were not surprised when her chauffeur was ordered to collect her preferred delicacies from Harrods’ food hall. So convincing was her queenly persona that during her trial, one of the lawyers referred to Brooks as ‘HM’ — Her Majesty.
But the great manipulator’s trademark work was done behind closed doors where she operated as a worldclass networker and schmoozer.
Louise Weir, Brooks’s best friend from primary school, has said: ‘It was obvious she was going to get places. There’d be fall- outs with friends, but if she needed something from that person, she’d be able to sweettalk them round. She has always been able to get what she wants out of people — even if they don’t really like her.’
Mr Cameron, who used to sign off his ill-advised text messages to Brooks with a sickeningly matey LOL — until it was pointed out that the letters meant Laugh Out Loud rather than Lots Of Love — will be particularly relieved by her acquittal.
So, too, will his wife Samantha, for Brooks was once a regular invitee to the couple’s ‘kitchen suppers’ in Oxfordshire — the only newcomer among the Camerons’ coterie of established family friends.
Another couple who will be relieved are Brooks’s intimate friends Elisabeth Murdoch and her public relations ‘ guru’ husband Matthew Freud. Indeed, to mark Ms Murdoch’s 40th birthday, Brooks sycophantically arranged for a senior Sun executive to dedicate several weeks’ work to a 32-page souvenir edition for the birthday girl.
A delighted Ms Murdoch was overjoyed when she was handed a copy and saw how a photo of her head had been superimposed onto the body of a Page Three girl with the headline Lizzie’s The Breast.
With such chutzpah, is it any wonder that Rupert Murdoch accelerated Brooks’s gravity-defying career ascent from newsroom secretary to the apex of his British newspaper empire by making her chief executive.
THEREAFTER he shielded her from the snide comments of her colleagues that she lacked the basic journalistic experience and business nous for such a key role. If ever his son James raised questions in meetings about her ability, she would pointedly ignore him. One colleague said: ‘ She got away with murder because of her “in” with [Rupert] Murdoch, and nobody was brave enough to stop it.’
To suggest that Rupert Murdoch was simply Brooks’s boss is entirely to misunderstand the nature of their relationship.
From around the mid-Nineties, using all her feline wiles, she was much more than an old man’s platonic crush, but a key conduit f or Murdoch to the heart of the British political establishment — to Tony Blair, then to Gordon Brown, and when the politicals ands shifted, to Mr Cameron. Mr Blair, most of all, benefitted from the access to Murdoch.
Indeed, Brooks’s treatment of these political playthings was deeply cynical. For example, as Brown’s popularity rapidly declined, she caused him deep personal upset and fury by publishing details of his fourmonth-old son’s cystic fibrosis.
But such stories sold newspapers and, of course, made Rupert Murdoch money.
Even after her arrest, he doted on his muse — making a house near the Old Bailey available for 46-year- old Brooks and her legal team to work from and earlier comforting her through what she called her ‘ car crash’ personal life.
As revealed to the jury, this included a long-running sexual affair with the married former News Of The World editor Andy Coulson.
There was f amously, t oo, her arrest after giving her first husband, the macho TV actor Ross Kemp, a fat lip during an explosive domestic altercation.
Mr Murdoch was in London at the ti me and whereas some bosses might have f i red her because of the corporate embarrassment, he sent a designer outfit to the police station where she was being held overnight so she could arrive at her Wapping office the following morning looking her normal luminous self.
In return, she would do anything for Murdoch, performing the role of minder at social events, often putting her hand on his, ensuring his glass was f ull and t he f ood to his satisfaction, arranging birthday cards for him and introducing him to the most influential guests.
The pair would often swim together in an expensive private health club, and it was said that she took up sailing just to be seen to share one of his passions.
Murdoch has four daughters of his own, but often seemed to treat Brooks as the special one.
According to a profile in Vanity Fair magazine, the octogenarian media tycoon’s corporate circle is split between t hose who regarded Rebekah as his ‘ fantasy daughter’ and those who sniffily dismissed her as ‘the imposter daughter’.
Not surprisingly, when editor of The Sun, Brooks once introduced herself at the Hay Literary Festival by saying: ‘Everyone hates me.’
Whatever, she remained Murdoch’s favourite.
Indeed, his backing of her became most apparent when, humiliatingly, he had to close the News Of The World. His British newspaper empire, over which Brooks had presided, was in chaos.
Many journalists who were sacked as a result were furious, believing
that if Murdoch had acted quicker to lance the boil of public fury by jettisoning Brooks earlier, the paper might have survived.
Yet, as he walked from his Mayfair flat to a nearby hotel for dinner with his son James, and Brooks, the unrepentant tycoon was asked what his priority was at this moment of utter turmoil in his British press empire.
Significantly, he pointed at Brooks and replied paternalistically: ‘ This one.’ Those shocked by his papers’ excesses over the years watched in bafflement.
The fact is that Rebekah Brooks remains a great enigma, even to those who have worked closely with her. An only child, she was born in Warrington in 1968 and her early life is shrouded in some mystery, which she has been deliberately reluctant to clarify.
According to her birth certificate, her father was a deck-hand on a tugboat. In later years he became a gardener but left the family home when his daughter was a teenager. He died in 1996, aged only 50, of cirrhosis of the liver.
Clearly the experience had a searing effect on Rebekah.
She is said by former associates to be tactile with men, looking them straight i n the eye, confirming their assumption that they are important, attractive, and certainly the most significant person i n the room.
After school, she went to Paris, and for years afterwards, she tended not to correct the suggestion that she graduated from the respected Sorbonne educational establishment, although she took only a short, part-time course there.
As a girl, she had always wanted to become a journalist and acted upon the ambition with commendable single-mindedness.
After starting by making the tea at her local newspaper, she was hired as a secretary at Eddy Shah’s paper, The Post, before joining Murdoch’s empire as a lowly researcher on the News Of The World magazine.
Despite warnings from his editors that she lacked the experience to be promoted up the command chain, he encouraged her.
By the age of 27, she was deputy editor of the News Of The World and later editor and then, when she was just 34, Murdoch appointed her editor of the jewel in his newspaper crown, The Sun. It was the job she had dreamed of since childhood, she told the staff, and no one doubted that.
At that point, The Sun was still a solidly New Labour newspaper, and she was seemingly happily married to Ross Kemp, a committed Labour supporter.
She would play off Tony Blair against Gordon Brown, having dinner with them in succession. ‘If Blair wanted to know what Brown was doing, she’d fix up the dinner and then tell him,’ John Prescott, then deputy leader, recalled.
Yet behind t he public selfconfidence, her private life was a mess.
As she tearfully told the Old Bailey jury, she and Coulson had embarked on an affair. She said she first became ‘ close’ to him i n 1998, f our years before her marriage to Kemp.
But they rekindled their affair between 2003 and 2006 after her marriage turned sour. She told the jury: ‘I think probably everyo n e now knows my personal life was a bit of a car crash for many years.’
As for her relationship with Kemp, she explained: “We were both working incredibly long hours . . . in completely different industries. The whole relationship was a bit of a roller- coaster. Sometimes it was really good, and sometimes it wasn’t so. I think that’s how he would describe it.’
An email she wrote in 2004 to Coulson showed the depth of her emotional turmoil.
‘The fact is you are my very best friend. I tell you everything, I confide in you, I seek your advice, I love you, care about you, worry about you. We l augh and cry together . . . in fact without our relationship in my life, I am really not sure how I will cope.’
During the trial, this email was used by the prosecuting counsel to suggest that Brooks and Coulson t r usted each other implicitly and were therefore part of a phonehacking conspiracy at News International.
The jury did not accept this line of argument which is why Coulson now faces jail and Brooks yesterday walked free unconditionally from court.
Soon after her marriage collapsed, Brooks had been introduced to well-connected Charlie Brooks. A race-horse trainer, he is generally regarded as a genial sort of chap, if slightly roguish. He was a contemporary of David Cameron’s older brother at Eton, and as well as horse-racing, he dabbled in an online sex-toy business.
FRIENDS s ay he and Brooks are devoted to each other, and he was perhaps unfairly drawn into the case. Much to his embarrassment, it was revealed that during the investigation into phone-hacking, he had dumped a lap-top computer and some lesbian porn DVDs ( whose titles i ncluded Instant Lesbian, Bride Of Sin, and Lesbian Psychodrama volume 2 and 3) behind rubbish bins at their home so as to spare his wife the shame of the police finding them.
Other, wiser, men might have walked a c ouple of hundred yards further to get rid of the material elsewhere.
As for her future, Rebekah Brooks i s not short of money, having received a pay package worth £11 million after she resigned as chief executive of News International. Indeed, the firm’s annual results showed that her deal included the services of company employees for two years.
David Cameron was yesterday forced to express his remorse at having naively believed that Andy Coulson, the man he appointed as his head of press, had not been involved in hacking phones.
As f or his relationship with Rebekah Brooks, it will be a very long time — if ever — before she is invited back to one of the Camerons’ cosy Cotswold kitchen suppers.