Brooks personifies the change in Murdoch's style of governance. Without an inner circle of elders to moderate his responses, he leant more and more on talented younger people he selected as executive material – many of them journalists, singled out principally because their instincts, their willingness to go for the jugular, approximated to his own. When she resigned on Friday, Brooks said: "Rupert's wisdom, kindness and incisive advice has guided me throughout my career." Yet what he needed in his chief executive last week was someone who would have offered him some incisive advice. A woman whose main professional experience, before she was thrust into the boardroom, was to edit two downmarket tabloids was scarcely qualified to do that. She was his creation: the Eliza Doolittle to his Professor Higgins.