She rose to incredible power from the typing pool, but now Rupert Murdoch’s former right-hand woman, Rebekah Brooks, is facing jail over Britain’s tabloid phone-hacking scandal. Journalist William Langley once worked for Rebekah — now he investigates her spectacular fall from grace.
The hottest ticket in London these days is not for a blockbuster West End show or one of the glittering events being held to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The place to be is inside Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice, where each day a parade of movie stars, moguls, politicians and celebrities arrives to be interrogated under the stern gaze of Lord Justice Leveson.
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We have seen Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, J.K. Rowling, Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch and his son, James. These, though, were mere warm-up acts for the appearance of the woman at the heart of a scandal that is threatening to tear apart the world’s greatest media empire.
In tight suits and expensive slingbacks, Rebekah Brooks, an exotically coiffured, socially dexterous, 44-year-old redhead has clattered a path from the office typing pool to become one of the most powerful women in Britain. How she did it has long been a subject of curiosity and is now a matter of criminal investigation.
Around Ms Brooks swirl allegations of “dark arts” and “alchemy”, and her supposed activities and lifestyle are chronicled in the excited, tabloidish fashion in which she herself excelled as editor of two of Britain’s biggest-selling newspapers, The Sun and News of the World.
We have been treated to accounts of her schmoozing with prime ministers and royalty, of the glamorous parties she throws for the rich and powerful, and her own taste for high living.
Here’s Tatler, a glossy society magazine, reporting shortly before Rebekah’s lavish wedding to Old Etonian racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, “When Charlie wakes up in the mornings at his barn in Oxfordshire, he likes nothing better than to fly to Venice from Oxford airport with his soon-to-be wife, Rebekah, the dazzling redhead editor of The Sun, for lunch at Harry’s Bar. Later in the day, after shopping and sightseeing, the couple fly back to London for dinner …”
Today, Rebekah and Charlie are awaiting trial on charges of perverting the course of justice, an offence for which the maximum penalty is life imprisonment.
Yet these allegations are merely a sidebar to a far wider investigation into possible criminal activity at News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch’s global publishing business.
Last July, Rebekah was arrested by police looking into accusations of widescale phone hacking at the now closed News of the World (NoW).
The scandal exploded when it was revealed that someone from NoW had illegally accessed the mobile phone messages of a missing 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.
Soon the air was thick with claims that hundreds of other people — celebrities, politicians, sportsmen — had also had their phones hacked during Rebekah’s time in charge.
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She denied all knowledge of the hacking, but the denial raised an awkward question: how could the editor of a paper not know where its stories were coming from?
Jet-set jaunts to Venice are not a lifestyle familiar to anyone who grew up in the old Fleet Street of dingy pubs, dodgy deals and backstabbing. Or the kind that 81-year-old Rupert Murdoch, a sentimental admirer of that fading, ink-stained world, would normally approve of.
Rupert likes his journalists to be rough-hewn and schooled in the traditional ways of the trade. Such men and women had served him well all his life.
From one small newspaper in Adelaide, he had built a gigantic global empire and with it an immense personal powerbase. World leaders fawned over him. He was a man with no weaknesses. Except, it seems, one.
Quite how the young Rebekah captured Rupert’s attention is one of the central mysteries of her tale. She first came to work for him in the late 1980s, as a 21-year-old office assistant from Warrington, a down-on-its-luck industrial town near Liverpool.
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Adding a sprinkle of sophistication to her CV was her claim to have studied at the Sorbonne, the celebrated Paris university that had produced such intellectual luminaries as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir.
The university’s matriculation office tells me, however, that it has no record of Rebekah having been enrolled there and that no degree was issued in her name. Rebekah’s spokesman, David Wilson, head of a leading London PR agency, declines to elaborate.
It has been suggested she may have taken a short course “under the Sorbonne’s auspices”.
Does it matter? Louise Weir, a childhood friend from Warrington, says Rebekah’s real cleverness lay not in passing exams, but in understanding other people’s emotions. “She’s always been very charming and she’s always been able to get what she wants out of people.”
Her parents — Bob Wade, a one-time tugboat hand, and his wife Debbie — divorced when their only daughter was a teenager.
After leaving school, she landed a job as a secretary on a Warrington-based newspaper, The Post. One early colleague remembers her as being “phosphorescent with ambition”.
London journalist Tim Minogue, who worked with her during a brief stint in Warrington, agrees, “She was very keen, very quickly on to things. She was only a newsroom assistant, but she was always bombarding the desk with ideas. I’ve never met anyone so ambitious.”
The young Rebekah showed her mettle by volunteering to drive 1500km in 48 hours to bring back a crate of “aphrodisiac beer” from France, which the paper wanted to offer to readers as a prize. Not long afterwards, The Post folded and she headed for London.
Her first job, on NoW’s magazine supplement, was writing snippets about soap operas. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would detain her for long.
Soon, she was peppering executives with suggestions for stories, features and interviews. The paper’s senior hands — mostly grizzled veterans of doorsteppings and stake-outs — tended to ignore her, but one who listened was NoW’s youthful editor, Piers Morgan, now a prime-time celebrity interviewer on America’s CNN television network.
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“Piers didn’t really care that she’d never worked a news beat,” says one colleague. “He didn’t have that kind of background himself and he thought it was overrated, anyway. What he liked about Rebekah was that she was full of ideas and she’d do pretty much anything to get on.”
There was another talent that Rebekah possessed. To borrow a description once used about Pamela Harriman, the great American political insider, “You could lead her blindfolded into a crowded room and she would smell out the most powerful man.”
Rebekah’s genius for connecting with men who could assist her career led her inevitably into the presence of Rupert.
No one is quite sure how they first met, but it is likely that Piers did the introductions and from then on the relationship grew to the point that she came to be seen not just as his favourite executive, but as a kind of honorary daughter.
Photographs taken of them leaving London restaurants would show Rupert with his arm protectively thrown around her, a glow of fond indulgence replacing his usual mask of inscrutability. Eventually, he would give her two editorships and make her the chief executive of News International.
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To those less favoured, the rise of the “Red Menace” was difficult to understand. Certainly, she worked relentlessly and had an extraordinary ability to make important contacts, but it was hard, sometimes, to detect the real smarts beneath that unruly cascade of curls.
In the late 1990s, not long after I returned from a lengthy stint in Washington DC, Rebekah approached me in The Sun newsroom, where I was knocking out a column, to ask about the “Zippergate” scandal involving President Bill Clinton and a young intern, Monica Lewinsky, which was convulsing the US.
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” said Rebekah. “This kind of stuff happens all the time. Why’s everyone so bothered about it?”
I tried to explain. For years, Clinton had been dogged by allegations of infidelity, including a claim by Gennifer Flowers that they had had a 12-year affair, which almost derailed his presidential campaign in 1992.
When his affair with Lewinsky was exposed in 1998, humiliating his high-profile wife, he had tried to lie his way out of trouble and Washington wasn’t having it.
Rebekah was beginning to look bored. “They didn’t even have proper sex,” she complained. “I don’t get it. Who cares?”
A few weeks later, she phoned, asking for a column about the sleazy excesses of English soccer to be “toned down”. She was charming and faintly apologetic, but argued that the piece might be too strong for the paper’s football-besotted readers.
“We absolutely must have lunch,” she said. “Then we’ll understand each other better.” The lunch never happened. The column didn’t appear again.
Onwards and upwards, Rebekah soared. Not that everything went smoothly for her. In 2002, she married Ross Kemp, a 38-year-old, bullet-headed TV actor who played a hardman role in EastEnders, the hit BBC soap opera.
From this moment, Rebekah entered the celebrity orbit, appearing on Ross’ arm at movie premieres, showbusiness galas and in the royal box at Wimbledon. Her picture began appearing regularly in the glossies.
This kind of exposure would normally rile Rupert, who prefers his executives to be hunched over paper-strewn desks with mugs of lukewarm coffee. Yet he seemed to make an exception for Rebekah.
The showbusiness crowd was less forgiving. Hugh Grant, an arch-critic of Rebekah’s brand of journalism, recalls, “I bumped into her a few times at parties and I always walked straight out again. It used to make me absolutely livid that she was invited to showbusiness dos and would stand there as if she were a respectable human being.”
We can assume Hugh will not be appearing in the planned Hollywood movie about Rebekah’s life.
The marriage to Ross was not a success. In November 2005, following what the police described as “a disturbance” outside the couple’s London home, Rebekah was arrested on suspicion of assault and held for eight hours in a police cell.
Rupert sent her a change of clothes and personally welcomed her back to the office. Sporting a fat lip, Ross gallantly declined to press charges and the matter was dropped.
Yet, within a couple of years, it was all over. Not that Rebekah stayed single for long. Nor was her giddy ascent through the celebrity stratosphere impeded.
In 2008, she met Charlie Brooks, a popular, horse-loving socialite, at a lunch party thrown by Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear TV show presenter. Handsome and affable, Charlie, 45, hailed from a different world.
His distinguished family could trace its history back several centuries and, while at Eton, he had become close friends with David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister.
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Thus Rebekah joined what is known as the “Chipping Norton Set” — named after a posh village in Oxfordshire where many wealthy and powerful Londoners keep second homes.
Close to Charlie’s “barn” — a sprawling 17th-century farmhouse — was the country retreat of David and Samantha Cameron.
Near them was Clarkson’s Georgian spread and, just down the road, the magnificent $10 million converted priory occupied by Rupert’s daughter, Elisabeth, and her PR-whizz husband, Matthew Freud.
Rebekah and Charlie would do their weekend shopping at nearby Daylesford, where they were often seen huddled over steaming lattes. They looked happy and friends say they adore each other.
“Rebekah became a lot nicer after Charlie came into her life,” a former colleague at The Sun told me. “I’d see her at parties and she’d do this mock weeping on my shoulder and say, ‘I just want to be a wife and have babies, and get away from all this work’. Okay, she’d probably had a few, but you felt there was some truth in it.”
The whole “Set” turned out on June 13, 2009, for Rebekah and Charlie’s wedding at Sarsden Manor, a stately home on the edge of Chipping Norton.
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Rupert flew in by helicopter. James, who ran the Murdoch family’s European and Asian business interests, arrived by chauffeured limo. Gordon Brown, soon to be ousted by Cameron as Britain’s prime minister, came with his wife, Sarah.
The champagne flowed and the dancing continued late into the night. A month later, Rebekah Brooks (she made a point of taking Charlie’s name) was promoted to the post of CEO at News International (NI). She had reached a position of power no one who had known her in those early days as the office dogsbody could have imagined.
Yet it has been downhill ever since.
In July, The Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper with a long history of hostility to the
Murdochs, published a story claiming that NI had secretly paid large sums of money to people who claimed their phones had been hacked.
The timebomb was ticking, although it wasn’t until the Milly Dowler revelation that it exploded as a full-blown scandal.
In July last year, NoW was closed down and, a week later, Rebekah resigned. By then, she had been arrested but not charged by a dedicated police squad investigating phone hacking.
In May, she and Charlie were jointly charged with perverting the course of justice, a charge that stemmed from the discovery of a laptop and phone in a rubbish bin near their London flat.
Lord Leveson is not conducting a trial. The hearings at the Law Courts are part of a public inquiry into media ethics and conduct, triggered by the hacking affair.
On May 11, it was Rebekah’s turn to give evidence and her appearance caused a sensation. She wore little make-up, minimal jewellery and a simple, dark blue dress with white pie-crust collar — a look which was deemed to echo that of the accused women in the notorious Salem witch-hunts of 17th century America.
It was described as “Salem show trial chic” and the phrase was later reinforced when Charlie, in an indignant outburst on the steps of his lawyer’s office, claimed that there was, indeed, a “witch-hunt” against his wife.
In her evidence — which, for legal reasons, had to steer clear of the phone hacking allegations — Rebekah went further, suggesting that she was being targeted for being a woman.
“You have put to me gossipy items,” she told inquiry barrister Robert Jay QC. “Did Rupert Murdoch and I swim together? Did Mr Murdoch buy me a suit? The list is endless. I do feel that this is merely a systematic issue and I think a lot of it is gender-based. If I was a grumpy old man of Fleet Street, no one would write the first thing about it.”
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There was some sympathy for this point of view. Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, an online magazine, wrote, “The interrogation of Brooks and the media coverage it received were based on the age-old sexist idea that attractive, conniving women have the power to corrupt an entire political class.”
Earlier this year, Charlie and Rebekah had their first child, a daughter, born by a surrogate mother. It is known that they had been trying to start a family for some time and had unsuccessfully tried IVF.
In a statement, they referred to baby Scarlett Anne as “our beautiful little miracle.” It was impossible not to be pleased for them. Or to feel that more miracles may be needed to get Rebekah’s once-miraculous life back on track.
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