Rebekah, the world class schmoozer who bewitched three Prime Ministers... and Rupert Murdoch. Extraordinary rise of the tugboat crewman's daughter from Warrington

Rebekah Brooks mingled with Chipping Norton set, including David Cameron

She was always 'able to sweet-talk people', says childhood friend

Editor was conduit for Murdoch to the heart of the UK political establishment



Gave him access to Tony Blair, then to Gordon Brown and Cameron

Murdoch made a house near the Old Bailey available to her during trial

Told court she had an affair with Andy Coulson between 2003 and 2006

Brooks received an £11m pay package after leaving News International



She is cleared of conspiracy to hack phones and perverting course of justice

Her husband Charlie Brooks, PA Cheryl Carter and head of security Mark Hanna also cleared of perverting the course of justice

Coulson guilty of conspiracy to hack phones while editing News of the World



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.

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True blue pals: Rebekah Brooks became part of David and Samantha Cameron's circle of friends

How ironic, too, that she herself indulged in a pampered lifestyle that was utterly unlike those led 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 world-class 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 sweet-talk them round. She has always been able to get what she wants out of people — even if they don’t really like her.’

Power games: Rebekah Brooks chats to Tony Blair in 2004. Later she would play off the then Prime Minister against Gordon Brown

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.’

Fiercely protective: Rupert Murdock with Rebekah Brooks pictured leaving a London restaurant in 2002

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 for Murdoch to the heart of the British political establishment — to Tony Blair, then to Gordon Brown, and when the political sands 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 four-month-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 famously, too, 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 time and whereas some bosses might have fired 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 full and the food 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 those 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.

Walking free: Rebekah Brooks, former News International chief executive, left, accompanied by her husband Charlie Brooks, leaves the Central Criminal Court in London following their acquittal

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 in the eye, confirming their assumption that they are important, attractive, and certainly the most significant person in 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.

Love life: Brooks told the Old Bailey that four years before she married Ross Kemp (left) she had embarked on an affair with Andy Coulson (right)



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 the public self-confidence, 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 in 1998, four 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 everyone now knows my personal life was a bit of a car crash for many years.’

Differing fortunes: Andy Coulson now faces jail and Brooks yesterday walked free unconditionally from court

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 laugh 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 trusted each other implicitly and were therefore part of a phone-hacking 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 say 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 included 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 couple of hundred yards further to get rid of the material elsewhere.

As for her future, Rebekah Brooks is 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 for 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.

Not guilty Rebekah's eyes filled with tears

Almost exactly three years after her dramatic arrest, Rebekah Brooks could not hide her relief as she was cleared on all charges yesterday.

The former newspaper editor fought back a smile as she was acquitted of the first charge against her – conspiracy to hack phones.

As the not guilty verdicts continued, the 46-year-old began to shake visibly as the threat of criminal convictions and a jail sentence finally receded.

Cleared: Almost exactly three years after her dramatic arrest, Rebekah Brooks could not hide her relief as she and husband Charlie Brooks were cleared on all charges yesterday

In the last three years, Mrs Brooks has suffered the most cataclysmic fall from grace, from being one of the most influential women in Britain to one of the most reviled.

And for the past eight months she has been the focus of the most intense attention at Court No 12 at the Old Bailey, where every aspect of her life was dissected during her evidence.

As she was cleared of all charges, her eyes filled with tears. On one side, her devoted personal assistant and co-accused Cheryl Carter squeezed her arm and smiled as she was found not guilty.



On the other, her husband Charlie Brooks rocked back on his feet as he too was acquitted.

The jury also found veteran News of the World managing editor Stuart Kuttner and security chief Mark Hanna not guilty.

Mrs Brooks seemed to be trying to keep her emotions in check when the first of the not guilty verdicts was announced, simply nodding towards the jury with a slight smile.

Devoted: Brooks's personal assistant and co-accused Cheryl Carter (pictured) squeezed her arm and smiled as she was found not guilty

Dressed in a white blouse, she appeared to hold the hand of her former assistant as she was cleared. The pair looked at each other in the dock after the not guilty verdict against Mrs Carter was given to the court.

Mr Brooks stood with his hands folded in front of him as he was cleared. His wife brushed him comfortingly as the verdict was given, while he stood staring straight ahead.

Outside the courtroom, Mrs Brooks appeared overcome and close to tears. She was escorted through crowds by the Old Bailey’s matron, prompting confusion when some thought she had collapsed in court. But she apparently rallied enough strength to apply a fresh coat of lipstick before she left the Old Bailey, with her husband telling journalists that she had been advised not to speak.

The temptation to launch an assault on the police, the prosecution and her former political allies must have been almost overwhelming. But as she was bundled into a black cab by her husband and lawyer, Mrs Brooks’ smile spoke volumes. Several court staff waved goodbye as she went on her way.

Her lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw had argued the prosecution failed to produce a ‘smoking gun’ during her 14 days of intense questioning on the stand, likening the authorities’ decision to take her to court to a medieval witch hunt.

‘If what you saw was a mask, Mrs Brooks must be a witch with truly supernatural powers,’ he told the jury. ‘No human mask could withstand that amount of scrutiny without cracking.’

As the news of her acquittal broke, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, a friend of Mrs Brooks, said on Twitter that he was ‘beyond ecstatic’.



Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan tweeted: ‘So happy for my friends Rebekah and Charlie.’

It will provide some relief for Rupert Murdoch, who once described the woman who rose to be chief executive of his London-based News International operation as his ‘top priority’ when the phone hacking crisis broke in the summer of 2011.