Rebekah Brooks - who has now quit as News International chief executive - not only conquered the macho world of tabloid journalism to become its queen but did so with astonishing speed. What was behind her rise to power?
Rebekah Brooks - as she became following a second marriage - courted power but avoided publicity. The phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News International put her on the back foot, and in the public eye.
The commentator Henry Porter, who has written extensively about the power of the Murdoch press, claims little is known of Brooks personally.
"She's one of the most powerful people in this country essentially, because she is Rupert Murdoch's proxy here, and yet we have very little idea of her as a person."
The sense of mystery he describes certainly applies to Rebekah Brooks' youth. We know she was at school in Cheshire but very little else about her teenage years has been published.
However, someone who was close to Brooks in her youth, childhood friend Louise Weir, describes Rebekah as more emotionally intelligent than academic.
"She's been very charming and she's always been able to get what she wants out of people, even if they don't really like her.
"She is a typical Gemini; she's got her lovely fluffy side and then her angry side," Louise recalls. Ambition Rebekah Brooks' startlingly brief and opaque Who's Who entry mentions time at the Sorbonne, the prestigious Parisian university, but not whether she took a degree.
Colleagues at her first serious job in journalism remember her appearing as suddenly and mysteriously as a genie from a lamp.
Graham Ball was the features editor on Eddie Shah's famously short-lived Post newspaper when the 20-year-old Rebekah approached him in its Warrington offices.
"She came up to me and said 'I am going to come and work with you on the features desk as the features secretary or administrator'. I said 'I'm afraid that's not going to be possible because next week I'm going to London,' and I thought nothing more of it. The following Monday, I got to our new office in London, and there she was," he said.
"She did everything with great finesse, she was very clever."
When the Post folded, the then Rebekah Wade moved to the News of the World. The former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade met her just a couple of years after she had joined the News International team.
"She encourages you to feel that you're on her team, you're on her side. She'd say 'What should I do about this? How would I handle that?' And of course once you've given that kind of advice, you are much less likely to be critical."
Could the implications of phone hacking be as severe for Brooks as for Coulson? Not long after her appointment eight-year-old Sarah Payne was murdered by Roy Whiting.
Amid the public outcry that followed, Rebekah Wade launched a name-and-shame campaign against convicted child sex offenders.
The campaign was blamed for encouraging people to take the law into their own hands, and one chief constable called it "grossly irresponsible".
Rebekah Wade's stint as editor of News of the World also brought her into contact with the Labour politician John Prescott for the first time.
The paper had discovered that his wife Pauline had given given up a child for adoption when she was a teenager, and Rebekah Wade got in touch with the then deputy prime minister.
Lord Prescott says he was impressed with the way Rebekah handled the story calling her "very reasonable and professional", despite the later row over the way the story was dealt with by others at News International.
Well-connected Rebekah Wade moved to edit the Sun in 2003. Not long afterwards she appeared before the Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, and what she said under questioning from MPs has haunted her to this day.
Andy Coulson, her successor at the News of the World, was forced to come to her rescue when she suggested police officers had been paid for information in the past, a moment which typifies her ability in the public eye, according to commentator Henry Porter.
"She's obviously charming and an extremely adept politician and good at getting on with people, but when it comes to being in the public eye and having to think on your feet, I don't think she's that good."
Rebekah Brooks has written to the Home Affairs select committee, to say she had been talking in general terms. It has since been confirmed the police are considering a criminal investigation.
Rebekah Brooks is said to enjoy riding in the Oxfordshire countryside with David Cameron, and she invited the prime minister to her Christmas party. All very much in the best Murdoch tradition, according to Henry Porter.
"The Murdoch empire, always thought to be a Conservative organisation, actually is remarkably adaptable to politicians' views and actually doesn't have a strong ideological presence."
But the phone-hacking scandal has become a real threat to the interests of the Murdoch empire and its influence. It cost Andy Coulson his job at No 10 - it could cost News International millions of pounds in compensation.
And finally, on 15 July, after a relentless build up of pressure Rebekah Brooks quit as News International chief executive.
But with committee hearings and months of inquiries still ahead, she is unlikely to fade from the limelight.
0 comments:
Post a Comment