Is this Armageddon for Murdoch and NewsCorp?

Coulson arrested and charged
http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16238692

'Rocky' producer to make Rebekah Brooks film about the famed news exec's downfall

Project announced at Cannes festival, Nicole Kidman suggested to play Brooks
Comments (2)
By Meghan Neal / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Saturday, May 19, 2012, 11:46 AM

Updated: Monday, May 21, 2012, 12:16 PM.
























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Murdoch’s Sky News admits hacking emails, claims it was done for public good
CNN’s Piers Morgan refuses to name Paul McCartney voicemail source in British phone hacking probe
Murdoch hacking scandal blows up AGAIN: Slain UK girl's mom targeted by tabloid
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Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images



Nicole Kidman has been suggested to play Rebecca Brooks in the upcoming feature film.


Rebekah Brooks is about to get the Hollywood treatment.

'Rocky' producer Gene Kirkwood announced at the Cannes film festival Friday he plans to bring the disgraced News of the World editor's story to the big screen - and people are already taking bets on who will play.

Some were suggesting Nicole Kidman for the role, according to the Telegraph.

The news of the upcoming film comes just days after the former News Corp. executive was charged with conspiracy to pervert justice following the widespread phone-hacking scandal at the now-defunct tabloid.

The film will be based on Suzanna Andrews' Vanity Fair profile, 'Untangling Rebekah Brooks,' which detailed Brooks’ remarkable rise from secretary to Rupert Murdoch's right-hand woman.

Kirkwood's new studio BiteSize Entertainment optioned the rights to the article.

"She's a great story," Kirkwood told the Hollywood Reporter. "Her rise…is almost like Great Expectations -- with a moral."

The Vanity Fair article described Brooks as Murdoch’s "fantasy daughter,” and outlined her close relationship with Prime Minister David Cameron, who used to sign his letters to her, “Love, David.”

It described how the ambitious editor’s charming and gregarious personality made her a celebrity in her own right, before her eventual fall amid allegations of widespread curruption.

"We will make a film and also use it as a porthole into Murdoch's world," Kirkwood told the Hollywood Reporter. "I see it as a Citizen Kane approach.”

Brooks rose from secretary to Murdoch's right-hand woman, first as editor of News of the World at 31, making her the youngest editor of a British national newspaper.

She then became the first female editor of The Sun and eventually was made CEO of News International, News Corp.’s publishing arm in the U.K.

She quit the job in July amid the scandal.

The 43-year-old and her husband, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, were charged Tuesday with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Brooks allegedly tried to cover up the hacking scandal by paying off officials and concealing evidence from police, the Associated Press reported.

She will appear in court in June.

Kirkwood said the film will move into the next stage of the production as soon as there's a major development or closure to her story.

"As soon as there is an ending, we're going forward," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "Murdoch might retire -- who knows?"
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entertainment/movies/rocky-producer-rebekah-brooks-film-famed-news-exec-downfall-article-1.1081113#ixzz1wOWSeQfQ

'Rocky' producer to make Rebekah Brooks film about the famed news exec's downfall

Project announced at Cannes festival, Nicole Kidman suggested to play Brooks
Comments (2)
By Meghan Neal / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Saturday, May 19, 2012, 11:46 AM

Updated: Monday, May 21, 2012, 12:16 PM.


who would you choose to play Brooks? I think Meryl Streep.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


◄►Home UK News World News Business Politics video Showbiz News Technology Strange News Weather Your Videos Your Photos Blogs Contact Us Court Live Govt Drops Charity Tax Relief Plans Derby Fire Deaths: Parents In Court Hunt 'Worried' BSkyB Bid Would Fail Taxi Driver Denies Swindon Murder Yemen: 300,000 Kids Face Starvation Breaking NewsBreaking News5:04pm UK, Thursday May 31, 2012


Hunt Was 'Worried' BSkyB Bid Would Fail
146 Comments
Jeremy Hunt giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry
5:04pm UK, Thursday May 31, 2012

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt told George Osborne he was "seriously worried" the Government was going to "screw up" the BSkyB deal hours before he was given control over the bid.
Jeremy Hunt has been questioned at the Leveson Inquiry about his office's links with News Corp - which wanted to take over the broadcaster - and whether he was the right person to decide in a quasi-judicial role on the bid.

The inquiry heard he sent text messages to Chancellor George Osborne after receiving a phone call from James Murdoch questioning the legitimacy of the process when secret recordings of Business Secretary Vince Cable "declaring war" on News Corporation emerged.

Timed at 4.08pm, Mr Hunt's message to Mr Osborne read: "Could we chat about Murdoch Sky bid? I am seriously worried we are going to screw this up. Jeremy."

He immediately sent a second, saying: "Just been called by James M. His lawyers are meeting now and saying it calls into question legitimacy of whole process from beginning. 'acute bias' etc."

The embattled Culture Secretary previously conceded he was "sympathetic rather than supportive" of the bid by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

He told the inquiry that BSkyB was "the biggest merger the media industry had ever seen in the UK" and on which "thousands of jobs depended".

He said he was "broadly sympathetic" in his personal opinion of the bid and did not view it as having a major impact on media plurality.

:: Follow

RT “@adamboultonSKY: #Leveson PM Spokesman says David Cameron will NOT be referring Hunt for examination under ministerial code.”
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5:17 PM
Hunt finally finished, at 5pm. Quite a marathon session #leveson
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 3:58:57 PM 4:58 PM
Hunt accepts he probably said to Adam Smith "everyone here thinks you need to go" but says that didn't necessarily reflect his view #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 3:40:27 PM 4:40 PM
Hunt says he did think about his own position but says he acted with integrity throughout the bid process and decided not to go #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 3:38:41 PM 4:38 PM
On Adam Smith's resignation, Hunt says we came to the conclusion with very very heavy hearts that we had to accept his resignation #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 3:37:21 PM 4:37 PM
Another "I can't remember" from Jeremy Hunt, who must be getting tired by now, very long session #levesonamnesiasyndrome !
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 3:26:34 PM 4:26 PM
Medical alert: Hunt: "I just have no memory of it at all" Leveson Amnesia Syndrome strikes again! #leveson
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 3:11:51 PM 4:11 PM
Jeremy Hunt tells #LevesonInquiry that News Corp had massive, massive suspicions about Ofcom
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 3:01:33 PM 4:01 PM
Hunt says the pressure Adam Smith was under from barrage of News Corp communications pushed him into inappropriate language #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 2:50:03 PM 3:50 PM
Hunt says he wish he had done more to spell out to Adam Smith what he could say and do in contacts with News Corporation #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 2:47:05 PM 3:47 PM
Hunt interpreting email/text exchanges between Adam Smith and Fred Michel, says he believes Smith was trying to get Michel off his back
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 2:25:43 PM 3:25 PM
I wouldn't have predicted "courteous" as the most oft-cited word at #leveson
by joeyjonessky via twitter 5/31/2012 2:11:34 PM 3:11 PM
Hunt says he probably wouldn't take same view now, but believed his text message replies during BSyB bid were being courteous #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 1:58:11 PM 2:58 PM
Hunt says his Special Adviser Sue Beeby warned him off going for a drink with Andy Coulson - this was after he'd resigned from No10 #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 1:51:09 PM 2:51 PM
Adam smith told hunt Rebekah brooks had stepped down. "about bloody time", hunt replied
by joeyjonessky via twitter 5/31/2012 1:45:21 PM 2:45 PM
Hunt again pushing the Fred Michel was pushy line.. but his text replies to Michel seem to indicate a warmth rather than irritation
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 1:38:04 PM 2:38 PM
Discussing with @skymarkwhite whether one "lapses" into French as jay says. He's with the counsel to the inquiry
by joeyjonessky via twitter 5/31/2012 1:36:33 PM 2:36 PM
As Jeremy Hunt struggles, the govt announces U-turn on charitable donations: Are we expected to turn our attention away from #leveson?
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:55:20 AM 12:55 PM
Hunt: Adam Smith was a "buffer" so wldn't inform me of all News Corp contact (BUT he was Hunt's Special Advisor, his eyes & ears) #leveson
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:53:56 AM 12:53 PM
As NMJeremy Hunty struggles, the govt announces U-turn on charitable donations: Are we supposed to turn our attention away from #leveson ??
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:44:51 AM 12:44 PM
So far, Hunt's defence not terribly robust: Is he safer or less safe than he was at 10.00 this morning? #leveson
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:43:10 AM 12:43 PM
RT @adamboultonSKY: Amazing timing of charity tax u turn, hardly govt vote of confidence in way things are going for Hunt @ #leveson mor ...
by glenoglazaSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:41:24 AM 12:41 PM
RT @adamboultonSKY: Amazing timing of charity tax u turn, hardly govt vote of confidence in way things are going for Hunt @ #leveson mor ...
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 11:36:49 AM 12:36 PM
Hunt says he was worried there may have been a corporate governance issue at News Corp following the Milly Dowler #phonehacking revelations
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 11:26:22 AM 12:26 PM
RT @skymarkwhite: Good day to bury bad news? With Hunt on the stand, Chancellor announces u-turn on charities tax
by RobDavSky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:26:16 AM 12:26 PM
Good day to bury bad news? With Hunt on the stand, Chancellor announces u-turn on charities tax
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 11:21:23 AM 12:21 PM
Hunt on firmer ground, showing he played hardball with James Murdoch #leveson
by joeyjonessky via twitter 5/31/2012 11:14:29 AM 12:14 PM
Hunt says James Murdoch was very angry with his decision to seek independent advice even after News Corp agreed to hive off sky news
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 11:10:16 AM 12:10 PM
Hunt says we were not expecting this barrage of contact from Fred Michel, including more than 500 text messages and 140 odd calls #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 10:51:05 AM 11:51 AM
Of News Corp Lobbyist Fred Michel, Hunt says he was a character.. there was a bit of pushiness #leveson
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 10:45:34 AM 11:45 AM
Focus will inevitably turn to David Cameron now and why Hunt was appointed to oversee BSkyB bid when News Corp sympathies were well known
by skymarkwhite via twitter 5/31/2012 10:36:52 AM 11:36 AM< Newest12Oldest >


Another nail in Cameron's coffin ? Is Cameron afraid that by ereferring Hunt to the Ministerial code , more evidence will come to light??? Hunt probably
knows more than he is telling and Cameron knows he knows. Oh Dear PM, what poor judgement you have, appointing Coulson your Media man, getting
too cosy to Murdoch , Rebecca Brooks and her Husband, now having to support Hunt !!!

Maddie is getting her karma.

And the longer that some people have to wait, the more karma there will be! It's gonna be paid out in big bills!

June 2011
E-Mail MediaThe Dark Arts
It started when the News of the World hacked into the voice mails of the British royal household, in 2005, touching off a scandal that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—and, apparently, the British authorities—tried to contain. After a score of lawsuits and new arrests, the cover-up is falling apart.
By Sarah Ellison

EARS ON THE PRIZE News of the World reporters allegedly intercepted the voice-mail messages of actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller. Photographs © Daniel Hambury/EPA/Corbis (Law and Miller), by David Hartley/Rex USA (Harry and William), from John Frost Newspapers (newspapers), by Kevin Winter/Getty Images (Macpherson).

The Pugin Room in the Houses of Parliament is a small chamber where tea and other refreshments are served in a comfortable setting overlooking the Thames. Named for the architect who designed the elaborate Gothic Revival interiors of the parliamentary complex, it is wood-paneled and ornate, with small, low tables that can’t quite hide a worn red carpet. The quiet conversations are occasionally interrupted by the clanging of a bell that notifies members of an upcoming vote.

In these surroundings I recently sat with John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister to Tony Blair and currently (as Baron Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull) a member of the House of Lords. In 2006 one of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, the Daily Mirror, revealed that Prescott had been carrying on with a secretary in his office. The Daily Mirror’s competitors, eager to catch up, were scrambling for additional details. One of them, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, allegedly hacked the voice-mail messages left on the telephone of Prescott’s chief of staff, Joan Hammell. Prescott had been aware at the time of something amiss—messages known to have been left had somehow been deleted—but he put it down to a technical glitch. Only later, as the dimensions of Britain’s widening phone-hacking scandal began to emerge, was he able to piece a larger story together and then locate his own part of the story inside it.

Interactive: Breaking down the News of the World hacking scandal.
After years of virtually ignoring evidence of phone hacking that it held in its possession, on April 5 Scotland Yard arrested the former assistant news editor of the News of the World, Ian Edmondson, and the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, in connection with a new investigation. Three days later, after deftly stonewalling parliamentary inquiries and paying more than $2 million in settlements to keep the matter under wraps, Murdoch’s News Corp. offered an “unreserved apology and an admission of liability” to Joan Hammell and seven other victims of phone hacking. The seven are British actress Sienna Miller and her stepmother, Kelly Hoppen; a British member of Parliament, Tessa Jowell, and her husband, David Mills; a former Sky Sports commentator, Andy Gray; the soccer agent Sky Andrew; and Nicola Phillips, a London-based publicist. All of these seven have filed lawsuits. The following day the company sent letters to nine more plaintiffs. Seven additional lawsuits have yet to be officially filed but appear imminent. News Corp. says it plans to offer a settlement to those with “justifiable claims” of phone hacking. “Every day there were more damaging disclosures, death by a thousand cuts,” one News Corp. executive close to the phone-hacking case recently told me, explaining the company’s decision to apologize.

On April 14, the police arrested a third reporter from the News of the World, James Weatherup. The next day, many of the players on the victims’ side of the story gathered in London’s Royal Courts of Justice to learn how the presiding judge planned to deal with their lawsuits. The judge identified four test cases that could proceed later this year—the suits brought by Miller, Hoppen, Gray, and Andrew.

The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another. It is also what happens when one group, in this case News Corp., Murdoch’s media conglomerate, holds the goods on all the others.

Acting Alone?

Phone hacking is illegal in Britain, but that is a technicality. By all accounts, it was a practice that was indulged in by many reporters at many newspapers. “It started as a playground trick,” Paul McMullan, a former editor at the News of the World, told me. “It was so easy that everybody did it, and there was absolutely no reason not to.” No reason, that is, until there was a very good reason—when the practice suddenly went too far. In 2005, senior aides to the royal family noticed that voice-mail messages they had never listened to were showing up as saved messages in their in-boxes. At the same time, the News of the World was running stories about the princes that could have been known only to a small circle of intimates. One article quoted verbatim from a voice-mail message left by Prince William for his brother, in which William imitated Harry’s girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. Tipped off by the Palace, Scotland Yard launched an investigation.

In 2006 a reporter at the News of the World, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator who worked for the newspaper, Glenn Mulcaire, were found guilty of illegally listening in on the voice-mail messages of the royal household. The two men received short prison terms. The editor of the newspaper, Andy Coulson, resigned from his position, though he stated that he had no personal knowledge of phone hacking being done by anyone in his newsroom. Coulson described the phone hacking of the princes as the work of a “rogue reporter.” He was backed up by other executives at News Corp., which owns Fox Entertainment, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and several of the biggest newspapers in Britain, including the News of the World.

But the “rogue reporter” story wasn’t true. Phone hacking was common practice at the News of the World, and News Corp.’s stance finally crumbled amid a raft of lawsuits, a serious police investigation, and a steady stream of departures from the paper. Besides the victims already mentioned, the alleged targets of the News of the World apparently included the actor Hugh Grant, the comedian Steve Coogan, the model Elle Macpherson, the soccer stars John Terry and David Beckham, and even (the British press has suggested) Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Nobody knows exactly how many people were targets altogether—a conservative estimate would be 2,000, but the true figure could be double or triple that number. The scandal has touched some of the most prized executives at News Corp., such as Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive for its U.K. newspapers, and Les Hinton, the chief executive of Dow Jones & Co., who used to have Brooks’s job. Rupert Murdoch, 80, now must deal with allegations that some of his editors encouraged criminal activity and then repeatedly lied about it—sometimes under oath—to cover it up. The possible ramifications extend to British politicians of all stripes, who have for decades done what they could to curry favor with Murdoch, and to Scotland Yard, which has its own cozy relationships with the tabloids and is widely suspected of having tried to keep a lid on the revelations.

In the Pugin Room, Prescott is happily reliving the story of his unsatisfactory interactions with Scotland Yard. Prescott is something of a court jester and street brawler. When a protesting farmer appeared at one of his campaign rallies in 2001 and threw an egg at him, Prescott threw a punch back. A former ship’s steward and trade-union activist, he revels in his northern accent and his outspoken and brusque persona.

Prescott’s barrel chest puffs out as he sips his tea. He leans back, his legs splayed. For nearly two years, ever since The Guardian published a story revealing that his name had appeared on a list of public figures in handwritten notes belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, Prescott and his lawyers had been asking the police if they had any evidence of his voice mails being intercepted. He had received multiple letters in response, and gave me photocopies of them all.

When I look through the pages, I see that early letters informed him that the police had not uncovered “any evidence to suggest his phone had been tampered with.” The police wrote that they had referred the matter to the mobile-phone companies, which would “take appropriate action,” if warranted.

Prescott persisted, and continued to be told that there was no evidence to indicate that Goodman and Mulcaire had attempted to intercept any of his voice messages. And yet, in some of those same letters, the police told Prescott that in Mulcaire’s files they had found two invoices from News International Supply Company, a subsidiary of News Corp., to Mulcaire’s private-investigation company, for more than $400 each, with references such as “STORY: OTHER PRESCOTT ASSIST-TXT.” Scotland Yard added, “We do not know what this means or what it is referring to.”

Continued (page 2 of 6)
When I look up at Prescott, he nods back. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you bloody open them up and see, and then we’ll know whether it is tapped. That’s what investigation is about!’ They still refused to do an investigation.”

“Coulson Had to Know”

Sean Hoare has a smooth and relaxed voice over the phone. He speaks slowly, almost with a drawl, and it seems as if he might chuckle at any moment. He sounds young. It’s hard to square his voice with the man who greets me at the train station in the working-class town of Watford, outside London. Hoare’s face is covered with broken blood vessels, and he walks stiffly, with a limp. He apologizes multiple times for the inadequacy of the restaurant we walk to for a coffee. Hoare is unemployed, though he takes occasional jobs around town. His days as a reporter have clearly taken their toll. “I was paid to drink and do drugs with rock stars,” he tells me, by way of explanation.

Hoare has agreed to talk to me about phone hacking at the News of the World, where he worked for more than 10 years. He is cagey on specifics, worried—as he needs to be—about the legal implications. What seems to offend Hoare more than anything is the fact that the practice of phone hacking, and digging into people’s private lives in general, was so widely encouraged by the paper’s top brass—and yet, when Goodman was found guilty of hacking into phones, he was abandoned by his former colleagues.

Hoare had worked closely with Andy Coulson for a long time. He described an enormously competitive tabloid culture: “Your brief, above all else, was to deliver.” The advantage of phone hacking, Hoare said, was that it provided verification of rumors. Once a journalist had confirmed a story through phone hacking, he could take the tidbit to the celebrity’s publicist and begin trading. “You’d say, I’ve got this detail. I don’t want to fuck over your client, but what do you have for me?” Then the publicist would offer an alternative story, and Hoare would back off, all the while knowing he had the initial piece of information if he ever needed it. “It’s not really about journalism,” he said. “It’s negotiation. It’s basically like Wall Street with words.”

The News of the World is no stranger to criticism of its methods. For instance, it employs “the Fake Sheikh,” who conducts sting operations on politicians and businessmen. In 2001 he recorded Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, making disparaging comments about certain members of the British government and appearing to use her royal status in order to gain clients for her public-relations firm. To prevent publication of her comments, she agreed to an interview with the News of the World about her views on pregnancy and the possibility of undergoing I.V.F. treatments. The paper published the story under the headline MY EDWARD’S NOT GAY, nodding to continued gossip about the prince’s sexuality. Last year, the Fake Sheikh taped Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, offering access to her former husband, Prince Andrew, for more than $700,000.

The News of the World can be a cutthroat environment. Hoare recounted the story of a former colleague, Matt Driscoll, who was dismissed by the newspaper and then sued it, citing the bullying behavior of Coulson and other editors. In November 2009, the court found in favor of Driscoll, and the News of the World was required to pay him about $1.3 million.

Hoare left the paper in 2005, in part because of his drug and alcohol problems. He is an easy witness to discredit, and people I speak to at News Corp. don’t hesitate to try to do so. But it’s not hard to see why Hoare was such a good journalist in his day. He speaks softly enough that I have to lean halfway over the table to hear him. He often sounds as if he walked off the set of a Guy Ritchie movie. He asks as many questions as I do. About Coulson, he says, “Either Andy was a dreadful editor or a liar. You cannot run a newspaper and not know where things come from.” Phone hacking at the News of the World, Hoare goes on, “was encouraged as long as you didn’t get caught. Andy was aware that the practice was going on.”

Paul McMullan told me that phone hacking “was so common that I reckon a quarter of the British population was doing it. Coulson had to know.” McMullan explained that phone hacking was in fact a step down from what he used to do when mobile phones became popular and ran on analog technology. “You could go and legally buy a scanner and sit outside Hugh Grant’s house and listen to his calls as they happened,” McMullan said. “I remember transcribing Prince Charles’s conversations with Camilla just by scanning mobile phones. And Diana talking to her lovers. This goes back a long time.” When the mobile carriers switched to digital technology, scanning became much more expensive, so reporters settled for hacking into people’s mobile-phone messages.

Hugh Grant recently wrote an article, “The Bugger, Bugged,” for the April 11 issue of the New Statesman, guest-edited by his former girlfriend Jemima Khan, in which he interviewed McMullan. Grant wrote that just before Christmas, when his car had broken down on a country road, a white van pulled over, not to help him, but to snap pictures. The man at the wheel of the van was McMullan, who now runs a pub in the seaside town of Dover. McMullan still keeps a camera in the glove compartment, so that he can practice his old craft on a freelance basis when the opportunity arises, as it did with Grant. In the end McMullan offered Grant a ride, and on the way McMullan told the actor that he had been a victim of phone hacking.

When Khan asked Grant to write an article on the subject for the magazine, he returned to McMullan’s bar and secretly taped the conversation. With regard to phone hacking, McMullan told Grant that Andy Coulson “knew all about it and regularly ordered it.” Because he didn’t know he was being taped, he was generous with his accusations. He said Rebekah Brooks, too, knew that the practice was common, and that because she rode horses regularly with David Cameron, he also must have known. McMullan added that “20 per cent of the Met [Metropolitan Police] has taken backhanders from tabloid hacks. So why would they want to open up that can of worms?”

Quiet Settlements

During the investigation into Mulcaire and Goodman, in 2006, Scotland Yard seized a trove of computer records, audiotapes, handwritten notes, and paperwork of various kinds. The records yielded 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the two men had an interest, along with 2,978 mobile-phone numbers, 30 tapes that appeared to contain recordings of voice-mail messages, and 91 PIN codes to access voice-mail boxes. The number of victims was potentially enormous, in other words, and the raw material for a thorough investigation was essentially sitting on the table.

But Scotland Yard notified only five people (beyond the princes and the royal household) that their voice mails may have been intercepted, then let the matter rest. Those five appeared in Mulcaire’s indictment: Liberal Democrat member of Parliament Simon Hughes; Elle Macpherson; soccer agent Sky Andrew; Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association; and Max Clifford, a powerful British publicist, who has made a career of brokering stories between celebrities and tabloids. In May 2007 the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body overseeing the newspaper industry, published a report on phone hacking in which it said that it had found no evidence of wrongdoing other than the episodes that had already come out.

Two of the people notified by Scotland Yard—Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford—sued the News of the World. In an effort to prevent additional names from coming to light, the paper settled with Taylor in 2008 for more than $1 million.

Rupert Murdoch seemed to have had no knowledge of the Taylor deal a year later, in the summer of 2009, when The Guardian reported on the settlement. “If that had happened, I would know about it,” Murdoch said when asked about the payment in an interview from the annual Allen & Co. conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Bloomberg news service, the night the Guardian story went up on the Web. The Taylor payment had been personally approved by Murdoch’s son James, to whom Rupert had handed control of his company’s operations in Europe and Asia.
Continued (page 3 of 6)
In the case of Clifford, the News of the World reached a settlement masked as a business arrangement, agreeing to pay him roughly $1.5 million, including legal fees, ostensibly in exchange for providing the paper with stories about his clients and others. Clifford had won a court order in February 2010 demanding that Mulcaire name people at the News of the World who had asked the investigator to target him, and that he reveal to whom he had provided Clifford’s voice-mail messages. Rebekah Brooks contacted Clifford and arranged to have lunch. “We got together and quickly resolved our differences,” he told me.

After revelations about the Taylor settlement, News of the World executives and the author of the Guardian story, Nick Davies, were called before a parliamentary inquiry. Les Hinton testified that “we went to extraordinary lengths” to investigate phone hacking. “There was never any evidence delivered to me that suggested that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.” But in the course of his appearance, Davies produced evidence that implicated two other News of the World reporters, Neville Thurlbeck and Greg Miskiw, in phone hacking. That evidence included e-mails from a junior reporter at the News of the World delivering transcripts of what appeared to be Taylor’s hacked voice-mail messages to Thurlbeck. And Davies provided another document, a contract signed by Miskiw offering Mulcaire a bonus if he could nail down a story the News of the World was pursuing about Taylor’s personal life. Miskiw is widely remembered for a remark caught on tape, 10 years ago, in which he sought to explain the purpose of tabloid journalism to a young reporter: “That is what we do—we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”

The British press gave virtually no attention to Davies’s testimony. The theory at The Guardian is that the use of phone hacking had become so common that many newspapers were loath to point fingers. Indeed, in 2003 the Information Commissioner’s Office—the agency charged with enforcing data privacy and government transparency—had looked into the activities of another private investigator, Steve Whittamore, who worked for many British newspapers. Over a three-year period, the I.C.O. revealed, more than 300 journalists had hired Whittamore. The newspapers spanned Fleet Street and were not limited to the tabloids. The Daily Mail was the most frequent client. The News of the World ranked fifth. News Corp.’s Times of London and Sunday Times were also among Whittamore’s clients, as was the Guardian Media Group’s Observer. The report covered not just phone hacking but other “dark arts,” such as blagging (tricking organizations such as phone companies and banks into disclosing personal information), illegal searches of police and other government records, and using cell-phone numbers to get private addresses.

Operation Weeting

For a long time, The Guardian was the only newspaper that would cover the phone-hacking story seriously. Frustrated by the lack of attention in Britain, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger e-mailed New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and encouraged him to look into the phone-hacking story. In September 2010, more than a year after the Guardian revelations, The New York Times ran a lengthy story on the scandal which quoted Sean Hoare saying that Coulson actually encouraged phone hacking. Unnamed Scotland Yard detectives alleged that they had deliberately curtailed their investigation because of a close relationship with the News of the World. The Guardian followed up with another story and quoted Paul McMullan, who stated that Coulson surely knew what was going on.

By the fall of 2010, references to Coulson were more newsworthy than they would have been several months earlier, because Coulson was now the chief communications officer for the new prime minister, David Cameron. Under pressure, Scotland Yard reopened its investigation to look at “new” evidence—in other words, evidence other than the ample evidence it already had in its files—and it questioned Hoare and McMullan “under caution,” which meant that anything they said could be used to prosecute them. It was unusual to interview potential witnesses in a case as suspects, a tactic that was likely—perhaps intended—to intimidate others who might otherwise speak out. John Prescott, meanwhile, had been confirmed in his suspicions, and he formally applied for a full judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the case.

In December, Scotland Yard announced that it had found no new evidence of crime in its latest inquiry, but civil lawsuits were beginning to unearth what the police had not. Lawyers for Sienna Miller claimed that one of the News of the World’s most senior journalists, news editor Ian Edmondson, had instructed investigator Glenn Mulcaire to listen to Miller’s voice mails, as well as those of her ex-boyfriend Jude Law and Law’s personal assistant. Other lawsuits uncovered more names of News of the World reporters in Mulcaire’s notes, exploding News Corp.’s “rogue reporter” defense.

Just before Christmas, News Corp. suspended Ian Edmondson. On January 13, the Crown Prosecution Service said it would mount a “comprehensive review” of phone-hacking material held by Scotland Yard. On January 21, Andy Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, saying that “continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110 percent needed in this role.” He went on to observe, “When the spokesman needs a spokesman it’s time to move on.” Coulson stood by his position that he was not aware of any phone hacking that had occurred on his watch. Five days later, after News Corp. handed over a trove of e-mails, Scotland Yard announced a new investigation into phone hacking—Operation Weeting, it is called—run by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers of the Serious and Organised Crime Command, the division that usually deals with organized crime. There are now about 45 officers working on the case.

The Plaintiffs

It’s hard to find anyone among a certain stratum in London these days who doesn’t believe his or her phone was hacked by the News of the World. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications czar, told me he felt sure his phone had been hacked—he remembers arranging private meetings via cell phone, only to be surprised by a News of the World photographer when he arrived. So far, two dozen people have been willing to step forward and take on the newspaper in the courts. The names of all the litigants are not known, because many of the actions have been brought privately. Here are some of the plaintiffs:

Steve Coogan: British comedian and actor. In August 2005, the News of the World wrote that Courtney Love claimed she was pregnant with Coogan’s child. The story came out shortly after Coogan and his wife had divorced. Both Coogan and Love dismissed the story. Coogan is suing the paper and Glenn Mulcaire on the grounds that they intercepted his voice-mail messages and misused his private information.

Brian Paddick: A former deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard (and the highest-ranking openly gay police officer), Paddick came to the conclusion that his phone had been hacked after the News of the World reported that he had bought his partner a watch while on vacation in Sydney, Australia. Paddick had told no one else of the purchase, but had called his bank from his cell phone to lift the limit on his credit card.

Nicola Phillips: A former assistant to Max Clifford, she claims that the newspaper accessed her voice mail in order to match a story that was being published in the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday, alleging that Ralph Fiennes had cheated on his girlfriend with a Romanian singer, Cornelia Crisan. Phillips was a friend of Ian Edmondson’s. When I talked to her in April, she told me that Edmondson called her when she first filed her court papers, in March of last year, to discourage her from moving forward. “I’m risking everything by taking this case, in terms of who I’m taking on, and that of course is a worry,” she said. “I’m small. I’m of no interest to anybody. I’m not a celebrity. I’m not famous. I’m still having to live day to day and having to go out and work to pay my bills. I’ve been up and down over this.” She added that she has been tempted to drop her case, “but then I can’t run away because I’ll bankrupt myself and be on for everybody’s legal costs.” If a plaintiff drops a legal case, British courts require the plaintiff to pay the defendant’s legal fees.
Continued (page 4 of 6)
Leslie Ash: A British TV star, she is married to Lee Chapman, a former soccer star. When Ash went to the hospital for a cracked rib and contracted a potentially fatal hospital infection, she and her husband were hounded by paparazzi. She has seen evidence from the police that shows the names and phone numbers of her sons, who were 11 and 13 at the time of her hospitalization, in Mulcaire’s files. She believes that the News of the World was listening to messages her sons left her when she was in the hospital.

George Galloway: A former member of Parliament, he was informed of evidence last fall that Glenn Mulcaire had hacked his phone. He told the BBC that the News of the World had offered him “substantial sums of money” to settle his suit.

Paul Gascoigne: A former soccer star, Gascoigne alleges that the News of the World invaded his privacy, thereby hindering his drug and alcohol recovery.

Chris Tarrant: The host of Britain’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Tarrant decided to sue after he found out that Mulcaire had his cell-phone number and three others linked to him, including that of his estranged wife.

Kelly Hoppen: She is Sienna Miller’s stepmother and an interior designer. Earlier this year, her lawyers obtained evidence from her phone company, Vodafone, that on June 22, 2009, the day after the Mail on Sunday wrote that Hoppen was having a relationship with Guy Ritchie, her cell phone had been called by someone who hung up when Hoppen answered, and then called back to dial into her voice mail for about 25 seconds. Vodafone disclosed that the calls had been made from a cell phone registered to the News of the World in the name of feature writer Dan Evans. In High Court in February, lawyers for the News of the World said Evans had dialed the number in error.

Sienna Miller: Miller was one of the first to file a suit, and her case has driven many of the most important revelations. The 29-year-old’s relationship with actor Jude Law was intense tabloid fodder. They had met on the set of Alfie, in 2003, and become engaged. Then, in 2005, Law admitted he was having an affair with his children’s nanny. The two split up. When they re-united, the tabloids speculated furiously that they had become engaged again, reporting that Law had bought Miller a grand piano for Christmas, with a diamond ring worth more than $200,000 hidden under the lid.

Miller sued News International last fall and has been tight-lipped ever since. (Jude Law, for his part, recently won an order for disclosure against the Metropolitan Police.) Miller did give an interview recently to The Guardian to promote her role in the play Flare Path, in London’s West End. “I don’t think I’m going to be in too many Murdoch papers from now on,” she said in the interview. “I’ve bought my freedom, in a way.”

“Out of the Woodwork”

John Prescott is recalling his meeting with Sue Akers, of the Serious and Organised Crime Command, in mid-February. For two years he had been running into a wall with Scotland Yard.

One school of thought about the behavior of the police throughout the phone-hacking affair is that they engaged in a more or less benign cover-up—something akin to triage. The messages of Prince William and Prince Harry were intercepted at a time when Scotland Yard was busy with counterterrorism in the wake of the London bombings in July 2005. The police, according to this interpretation, limited the initial investigation and then moved on.

A second school of thought, widely subscribed to in London’s newsrooms and among lawyers involved in the case, sees a far more nefarious dynamic at play. It is that the police sat on evidence because they were eager to stay in the good graces of Murdoch’s tabloids, and also because key police officials had their own dirty laundry to hide. Both Andy Hayman, who took charge of the initial inquiry, and John Yates, who was responsible for the later inquiry, in 2009, have been targeted by the tabloids for alleged indiscretions. More broadly, tabloid newspapers and police departments routinely rely on one another: the tabloids want good stories, and the police want good coverage. Rebekah Brooks, testifying before a parliamentary inquiry in 2003, admitted that the News of the World had paid the police for information, which is illegal. (She has since backtracked from this admission.) After leaving the police force, Andy Hayman went to work for Murdoch’s Times as a columnist.

When Sue Akers sat down with Prescott, she had some news for him. “We met in this room, over there, with a cup of tea like this,” Prescott says, gesturing to a table across the room. “And then she told me that they have discovered that my chief of staff, Joan Hammell, had her phone tapped into 45 times with messages from me.” He pauses. “Now, what is significant in all these things is that the date they did the tapping was the date that I was exposed as having an affair, and what they wanted was more information about the affair.”

Prescott relates the story matter-of-factly. The date was April 26, 2006. On that day the Daily Mirror published its story about John Prescott’s affair with his appointments secretary, Tracey Temple. “Then it was all the press who wanted me. ‘Oh, Prescott, let’s get him,’” he growled. “So they want a story, any story, any information to get ahead because the story had broken somewhere else. Anyway, I was surprised how it broke and I rang Joan.” He pauses. “I admitted it right away, by the way. I never go into such a ducking and diving. There’s no point once the press are on it. You might as well put your hands up”—he puts his hands up—“and say, ‘That’s it.’ So I rung Joan. When I tried to get her, she often said to me, ‘You never left me a message.’ But I left her messages to ring, and she never got them.” It is Prescott’s suspicion that those messages had been intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire or someone else working for the News of the World, and deleted.

When I ask Prescott why he thinks it took so long for the police to get in touch with him and provide specific information about his case, he doesn’t hesitate. “Murdoch left it to this woman called Rebekah Wade, who I can’t bloody stomach.”

Rebekah Wade—now Rebekah Brooks—at the time was the editor of Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and is today chief executive of News International. She once famously spent a night in jail after her first husband, British soap-opera star Ross Kemp, of EastEnders, called the police, saying she had struck him during a domestic dispute. Brooks has become a central figure in the phone-hacking scandal because of her steadfast loyalty to the Murdochs and her perceived influence in British society and politics. At her wedding in 2009, to her second husband, Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer, David Cameron and Gordon Brown were both guests.

As Prescott tells it, Rebekah Brooks was used to manipulating the press, the police, and politicians, and so must have thought News Corp. could control the phone-hacking story. Certain aspects of it would have made her especially nervous. The investigator Mulcaire had a habit of writing the name of any reporter he was working with in the top left corner of his notes. Mulcaire’s notes mention four first names that appear to be those of reporters and editors at the News of the World: Clive Goodman, Ian Edmondson, Greg Miskiw, and Neville Thurlbeck. There was great incentive at News Corp. to keep the story bottled up. Perhaps the police could help with containment? That possibility aside, the first line of defense had been the “rogue reporter” story. A second defensive maneuver consisted of the settlement payouts. Eventually an editor, Edmondson, had to be fingered.

Prescott said, “They thought [the early settlements] would put it to bed, because News Corp. were so powerful. ‘We’ll forget this story—it’s yesterday’s news.’ That’s what they thought they could do. They had the police on their side. So this whole structure was working to this one bloody stupid story, which was the rogue reporter. They knew if it opened up it would go right down the line, so they tried to hold it. Then Murdoch discovered that whatever she had done wasn’t holding the line at all—if anything, it was, most of it, coming out from the civil inquiries, and then more people started coming out of the woodwork.” Eventually, Murdoch went to London to assess the situation for himself. “The story that she kept telling, I presume, was ‘Don’t worry—we’ve got it in hand.’”
Continued (page 5 of 6)
Prescott needs no encouragement to think ill of Rebekah Brooks. He is convinced that she ingratiated herself with British politicians, then used her position to pit them against one another. “When I was trying to keep the balance between Brown and Blair, who didn’t always get on, Blair would complain that Brown had said something, and I would say, ‘Where did you find that out?’ ‘Well, Rebekah Wade told me.’ Then the other one would have dinner with Rebekah Wade and tell Brown about Blair.” He looks scornfully into the distance. “I said, ‘This bloody woman is playing the two of you off each other—will you bloody dump her, for Christ’s sake!’” (Rebekah Brooks declined to be interviewed for this story.)

A “Berlusconi Moment”

From the perspective of News Corp., the expanding attention to the phone-hacking scandal has transformed it from a local nuisance in London to something that represents a major headache for the entire company. By the fall of 2010, for the first time, top executives in New York were paying attention. As Murdoch saw it, media coverage of phone hacking was just an example of his competitors using their news pages to attack his commercial interests—intolerable when done by others. Specifically, he believed, they were trying to scuttle his company’s deal for the satellite broadcaster BSkyB by making News Corp. seem to be a criminal enterprise.

BSkyB is a public satellite-broadcasting company with more than 10 million subscribers. It offers broadband Internet and telephone service and distributes television programs and movies through its on-demand offerings. James Murdoch can be credited with its impressive growth. But some commentators have referred to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB as Britain’s “Berlusconi moment,” referring to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who in addition to serving as the country’s prime minister also controls three national television channels, a publishing house, an advertising-and-publicity agency, and two newspapers.

In June 2010, less than a month after David Cameron became prime minister, News Corp. announced its offer to purchase the portion of BSkyB that it did not already own—some 61 percent. Negotiations duly got under way. In October, an alliance of media companies opposed to News Corp.’s acquisition of BSkyB wrote to Vince Cable, the business secretary, saying the deal could have serious consequences for “media plurality” (that is, competitiveness) in Britain. The following month, Cable asked British and European regulators to investigate the merger.

Throughout January, there was a flurry of correspondence among News Corp., BSkyB, and Jeremy Hunt, the British member of Parliament in charge of reviewing the merger. Most of it had to do with Hunt’s requirement that News Corp. insulate Sky News from the rest of the company and limit News Corp.’s sizable market share in Britain. As he had before with The Times of London, The Sunday Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch proposed an “editorial independence” committee for Sky News—a patently unworkable scheme that has previously come to naught. On January 25, Hunt gave his view that the merger “may operate against the public interest in media plurality,” and said that he intended to refer the matter to the Competition Commission. But he gave News Corp. one more chance to amend its proposal. Rupert Murdoch flew to London to deal with the matter directly.

The British press gave considerable coverage to Murdoch’s arrival. It would be a busy week for him. On January 26, Ian Edmondson, the suspended News of the World editor, was formally dismissed from his job. The same day, Scotland Yard announced its new inquiry.

Over the past several months I’ve asked News Corp. executives what they think of the phone-hacking story and where it will end. They have done their best to shake their heads and look amused, if a bit beleaguered. I sat down with several of them in February in the company’s new London headquarters, not far from the famous Wapping compound that Murdoch secretly built in the 1980s so he could print his papers outside London and break the print unions. The headquarters, unlike the Wapping fortress, is light and airy. Across the courtyard, I could see James Murdoch’s office through the large windows around it. He was not in there. I noted that James had moved from the old office his life-size Darth Vader statue, a totem he has carried with him since his days running News Corp.’s Star TV in Asia, which competitors referred to as “the Death Star.”

The News Corp. executives told me that, from their perspective, there were three main elements of the phone-hacking story that needed to be dealt with. They believed they had two of them pretty well in hand.

The first was political. The resignation of Andy Coulson, they said, had slaked the Labour Party’s fervor for the cause. Indeed, they pointed out that, just two weeks after Coulson resigned, Labour M.P.’s received a widely publicized e-mail from a top Labour adviser (and former Times of London journalist) to stop stoking the phone-hacking debate: “We must guard against anything which appears to be attacking a particular newspaper group out of spite.”

The second element was the business fallout. When I met with them, the News Corp. executives seemed optimistic that the BSkyB deal would go through—and once it did, rivals would stop using phone hacking as a battering ram. In early March, the British government announced that it had indeed cleared the deal after News Corp. agreed to spin off Sky News.

The third element is the private civil lawsuits. These are proving more difficult to contain. The executives I spoke with felt that, once people realized there wasn’t much money to be made in chasing the News of the World for breaches of privacy, lawyers would have a difficult time signing up new clients. That may be wishful thinking. The police have identified 91 alleged victims of phone hacking in their latest investigation—a list that is likely to grow. Tom Watson, one of the British members of Parliament most critical of News Corp.’s handling of the episode, recently noted that solicitors are buying Google ads that pop up whenever you search for the phrase “phone hacking.” One lawyer suing the News of the World recently estimated that damages from the suits could result in settlements totaling between $150 million and $250 million. News Corp. is hoping it can settle the cases for less than $30 million.

Beyond Britain

Those who have decided to challenge the News of the World in court have an unexpected ally in the person of Max Mosley. The mild-mannered Mosley did not have his phone hacked, but he has been on the receiving end of the News of the World’s attentions. Mosley had been largely an unknown figure, outside of Formula One circles, where he served as the president of the governing body, until the News of the World, in 2008, plastered photos of him engaging in what the paper called a “SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS.” Mosley sued the News of the World for invasion of privacy. He admitted to engaging in consensual sadomasochism with the women, but denied that the episode had any Nazi overtones. He was particularly sensitive to any reference to Nazism, given that his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, had founded the British Fascist party and married his mother, Diana Mitford, at the home of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

Mosley won his suit, and the judge ordered the paper to pay him $120,000, the largest-ever award in a privacy case. News of the World also had to pay Mosley’s legal fees, which neared $900,000. Mosley has pursued the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg. He is seeking to require by law that British newspapers notify their subjects before printing a story about their private lives.

More pointedly, Mosley has agreed to use his own resources to fund phone-hacking lawsuits against News Corp.: “In a number of cases, I’ve said to people, ‘If you lose, I’ll stand behind you.’” Because of the way the British legal system operates, such backing is significant. As noted, unlike in the U.S., in Britain, if a party brings a suit and loses, that party is typically required to pay legal fees for the defendant. “In Britain, to bring a lawsuit, you either have to have no money at all or be eccentric,” Mosley says. He places himself in the latter category.
Continued (page 6 of 6)
There will continue to be fallout, beyond the recent arrests and the admission of guilt by News Corp. It is likely that other current and former News of the World journalists will find themselves in legal jeopardy. If one of them switches sides and starts to talk, the repercussions could be significant. In the meantime, News Corp. has been covering Glenn Mulcaire’s legal fees.

The position of Rebekah Brooks inside News Corp. at the moment appears secure. In January, she took her top executive team to Babington House, a private club in Somerset, in part to discuss how to minimize the damage from the phone-hacking inquiry. It was there that they started hammering out the settlement strategy. In late March, she delivered her three-year plan for the U.K. newspapers to Murdoch himself, which executives at the company took as a sign that his support for her remains undiminished.

In March, James Murdoch was named deputy chief operating officer of the company, a position that brings him to News Corp.’s headquarters in New York. He may not shake the impression that he has mishandled this affair, or that his father had to fly in personally to sort it out. (“He’s an idiot,” Prescott told me. “The kids are never up to their fathers, are they?”) But James is in fact a good businessman, and such perceived weaknesses are hardly going to keep Rupert Murdoch from handing his company over to his children.

The phone-hacking scandal is in some ways a quintessentially British affair, the product of a small and inbred society in which the elites in every sector are connected with one another through ties of business, family, politics, money, and sex. The connections are hard to disentangle, and a tug on any thread is felt by all the others. But the lessons go beyond Britain. They would apply, for instance, to the United States, where many of the potential Republican nominees for president have been on the payroll of Murdoch’s Fox News. They apply to any society in which relationships between press and public servants cross a line of intimacy, and deciding where one’s loyalty lies takes more than a moment’s thought.
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9:50am UK, Friday June 01, 2012

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will not be referred to the Ministerial Code adviser by Prime Minister David Cameron, Number 10 has revealed.
The announcement came after the Leveson Inquiry heard Mr Hunt told George Osborne he was "seriously worried" the Government was going to "screw up" the BSkyB deal hours before he was given control over the bid.

Jeremy Hunt was questioned at the inquiry about his office's links with News Corp - which wanted to take over the broadcaster - and whether he was the right person to decide in a quasi-judicial role on the bid.

The inquiry heard he sent text messages to Chancellor George Osborne after receiving a phone call from James Murdoch questioning the legitimacy of the process when secret recordings of Business Secretary Vince Cable "declaring war" on News Corporation emerged.


EX STANDARDS CHIEF: INVESTIGATION NEEDED
Timed at 4.08pm, Mr Hunt's message to Mr Osborne read: "Could we chat about Murdoch Sky bid? I am seriously worried we are going to screw this up. Jeremy."

He immediately sent a second, saying: "Just been called by James M. His lawyers are meeting now and saying it calls into question legitimacy of whole process from beginning. 'acute bias' etc."

The embattled Culture Secretary previously conceded he was "sympathetic rather than supportive" of the bid by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

He told the inquiry that BSkyB was "the biggest merger the media industry had ever seen in the UK" and on which "thousands of jobs depended".

He said he was "broadly sympathetic" in his personal opinion of the bid and did not view it as having a major impact on media plurality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2011/jul/15/rebekah-brooks-rise-power-in-pictures#/?picture=376900533&index=0

Well Rebekah sure moved in the right circles.!!!

BiteSize Entertainment is developing a movie about Rebekah Brooks, the former head of News Corp. (NWSA)’s British publishing unit, the Hollywood Reporter said, citing producer Gene Kirkwood.

The project about Brooks, who has been charged with trying to cover up the tabloid phone-hacking scandal, is in its early stages of development, with no writer, director, or budget, Kirkwood told the publication.

Kirkwood and partner Ross Elliot, who have optioned the rights to the Vanity Fair article “Untangling Rebekah Brooks,” will fold Kirkwood-Elliot Productions into the movie venture with Ron Bloom, chief executive officer of online video site Mevio, Hollywood Reporter said.

Brooks faces three charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, Alison Levitt, the principal legal adviser to Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions, said on May 15. Brooks has said she is “baffled by the decision to charge” her.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nicholas Larkin in London at nlarkin1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net

Untangling Rebekah Brooks





Rebekah Brooks was running the News of the World at 31, and Rupert Murdoch’s entire British newspaper empire at 41. A virtual member of the Murdoch family, close to Prime Ministers Blair, Brown, and Cameron, she relished her power—until the phone-hacking scandal took her down. Talking to Brooks’s former colleagues and friends, Suzanna Andrews uncovers the woman wrapped in the enigma, the keys to her meteoric rise, and the latest object of her incandescent ambition.




BySuzanna Andrews


Photo Illustration by Darrow; Photograph from Rex USA.
QUEEN OF THE RED TOPS Rebekah Brooks and Rupert Murdoch in March 2010, nine months after he named her C.E.O. of News International.


In the days after the June 2009 wedding party that took place at the 284-acre Sarsden estate, 75 miles northwest of London in the Oxfordshire countryside, it would be noted by the British press how remarkable it was, considering who the guests were, that the bride had managed to keep the event a secret from the media. There were no tabloid journalists hanging around the nearby village of Churchill, no paparazzi hiding in the bushes on the morning of June 13, the day Rebekah Wade, the editor of The Sun, Britain’s largest daily newspaper, celebrated her marriage to the former racehorse trainer and “international playboy” Charles Patrick Evelyn Brooks.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife, Sarah, attended, as did David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader and prime minister–to–be, and his wife, Samantha. Rupert Murdoch, The Sun’s owner, had flown in. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and her husband, the P.R. man Matthew Freud, who had helped to orchestrate the “media blackout,” had driven over from Burford Priory, their $7 million, 22-bedroom country home, 15 miles away. The guest list attested to the power Rebekah Wade had achieved, at the age of just 41, as the editor of The Sun, a tabloid with three million readers, and as the first woman to hold that job. But it also attested to her charm, “her warmth,” her “gregariousness,” and “her straightforward, sympathetic manner,” because the guests were also close friends. Sarah Brown had her for “sleepovers” at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. David Cameron was so close he reportedly signed his letters to her “Love, David.”

That the media blackout had been so successful was even more surprising, considering that, by 2009, Wade had become something of a celebrity herself, with her first husband, Ross Kemp, a star of the hugely popular soap opera EastEnders, and then with Charlie Brooks. Endlessly written about and photographed—at Ascot, sitting in the royal box at Wimbledon, helicoptering to the Glastonbury Festival—she was instantly recognizable with her pile of red ringleted hair. In the competitive, ruthless, often cruel, and largely male culture of the British tabloids, Wade stood out. She spoke French, and had attended the Sorbonne; she and Charlie Brooks were at the center of the social scene in Chipping Norton—the weekend hub of the wealthy and powerful in Oxfordshire.

The wedding party at Sarsden’s lake—where, according to a friend, Brooks’s father had proposed to his mother—was, as one guest recalls, “incredibly romantic and lavish.” It was “all very Disney-esque, where everything looks right.” And at the time, everything was going right for Rebekah Wade—now Rebekah Brooks. In just 20 years she had gone from being a secretary at one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to running his Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, at the age of 31, to running The Sun at 34. Her ambition had been described by the British media as “terrifying” and “phosphorescent,” but in her ascent up the ladder, it seemed she had never put a foot wrong. And just 10 days after her wedding party, she would climb even higher, when, on June 23, she was promoted to C.E.O. of News International, Murdoch’s newspaper empire in the U.K., which would make her one of the most powerful women in Britain.

As the 200 guests sipped champagne by the lake that day, few could imagine how fast Rebekah Brooks would fall. On July 15, 2011, two years after she became C.E.O., Brooks resigned. Two days later she was arrested “in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking” and interrogated by Scotland Yard detectives for nine hours before she was released on bail. Almost overnight—ever since it was revealed in early July that employees of the News of the World had hacked into the cell phone of Milly Dowler, a missing 13-year-old who was found murdered in 2002—Rebekah Brooks seemed to have become the most reviled woman in Britain, the woman at the center of what had begun as a phone-hacking scandal but has spread to include allegations of bribes to police, e-mail hacking, surveillance by private detectives of politicians and lawyers, and questions about a massive cover-up at News International. No charges have been filed against Brooks, and there have been no specific allegations of criminal wrongdoing against her, but the intensity of the anger toward Brooks has been accompanied by a growing number of questions as the judicial and parliamentary investigations have expanded and the extent of her influence has slowly emerged.

Brooks was the woman almost everybody had heard of, but about whom almost nothing was known. She rarely spoke in public or gave interviews, and when she did, she revealed nothing about herself. She was said to be closer to Rupert Murdoch than any of his six children, but of that relationship she never uttered a word, leaving it to Murdoch to raise questions about his own grip on reality in a remark he made on July 10. In an effort to stem the public rage, he had just shut the 168-year-old News of the World and put 280 people out of work. While walking with Brooks in Mayfair, he was asked by a reporter what his top priority was. Looking at Brooks with what seemed like deep affection, he answered, “This one.” It was a stupefying remark, but what Rebekah Brooks thought of it, no one could tell. She just smiled at the cameras, the cryptic Mona Lisa smile that could be seen in so many of her photographs—“as if she knows something she’s not telling,” says one journalist.

But that smile wasn’t on display on July 19 as Brooks told the parliamentary committee investigating the hacking scandal that she had never “condoned or sanctioned” hacking or even known that it was taking place at the News of the World while she was the editor. She said she had learned about the allegations that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked only when they were revealed in a story in The Guardian two weeks earlier. At the hearing she appeared exhausted, her trademark hair stringy and disheveled, but she testified calmly and coolly for nearly two hours. She said she had never met or had any dealings with Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator whose files, seized by the police in 2006, would trigger the national scandal with some 11,000 pages of notes and 690 audiotapes, indicating that nearly 6,000 people—including politicians, celebrities, police officers, and crime victims—may have had their phones hacked by the News of the World.

Like Rupert Murdoch and his son James, who both testified before her that day, Brooks would say there were facts she could not recall, matters she could not discuss, issues for which she had not been responsible. But her testimony was more impressive—she didn’t fumble like Rupert Murdoch, showed none of the testy defensiveness of James. Some would say her testimony was “masterful” and “deft.” Critics would go so far as to suggest that she had hired a makeup artist in order to make her appear so wan and worn. “She looked so vulnerable,” says one prominent author. She was “amazing,” says a woman who has known Brooks for more than a decade. “Here she is, the most hated woman in Britain, on national television, and the only sign that she was nervous was that she blinked a little more than usual,” says this friend. “She is completely nerveless.” But her testimony would also raise a question: if she knew as little as she said she did, how had she risen to such power?

Road to Ambition

In the many press accounts of Brooks’s life there would be a number of facts on which everyone seemed to agree. She was born Rebekah Mary Wade in 1968 in Warrington, a town in the North of England situated between Liverpool and Manchester. She was an only child, and growing up she had lived in a tiny village south of Warrington.

She went to the area high school, Appleton Hall County Grammar, and studied French. She had been so passionate about becoming a journalist that when she was 14 she began to spend her weekends and school holidays at the local newspaper “making tea,” she once said, “and helping out.” Although she later attended the London College of Printing, after high school she took off for Paris, where she worked for a French architecture magazine.

Frequent mentions of her Sorbonne education would come later, after she became editor of The Sun, in 2003. One or two press stories over the years would note that Brooks appeared only to have taken a class at the Sorbonne, not studied for a degree. However, few questions were asked, even by her friends. “She never introduced us to people from her past,” says one. “That was a little creepy, as if there was no past.” Only recently did the media begin to focus on what the BBC referred to as her “startlingly brief and opaque” biography in Who’s Who. It was not that Brooks ever lied. She simply “allowed myths to grow and never challenged them,” says Roy Greenslade, the media commentator, who has known her for two decades.


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Rebekah Wade was 20 years old in 1988 when she showed up at the Warrington office of The Post, a now defunct national tabloid. As Graham Ball, then the features editor, recalled to the BBC, she approached him and said, “I am going to come and work with you on the features desk as the features secretary or administrator.” He told her that would be impossible, as he was moving the next week to work in the paper’s London office. On the following Monday, he showed up at his new London office “and there she was.” As another editor recalled, she was a “skinny, hollow-eyed” young woman, who was “very, very, very ambitious,” and prepared to go to great lengths “to get on.”

In 1989, after The Post folded, Wade got a job as a secretary at the News of the World. She would soon move to the paper’s Sunday magazine, where she wrote for the TV soap-opera section. At some point Wade caught the eye of Piers Morgan, the editor of the News of the World, and now the host of CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight. In his 2005 book The Insider, he would recount with gusto the thoroughness with which Wade arranged to bug a hotel room in advance of a 1994 meeting between the paper’s editors and Princess Diana’s lover, James Hewitt. Taken with Wade, Morgan promoted her rapidly—too rapidly, some say. By 1995, when he left to become editor of the Daily Mirror, the 27-year-old Wade was the deputy editor of the News of the World.

Paul McMullan first met Wade in 1994, when she was still features editor. McMullan recalls how inexperienced she was. “She’d never done an investigation or written a news story,” he says, and she had little understanding of what went into the reporting of one. A former deputy to Wade, he is today a central figure in the hacking scandal, one of the few journalists to not only publicly admit that hacking was widely practiced but also to defend it. “I think you can do anything to get at the truth,” McMullan says. “The criticism is we did it so badly and so often under her stewardship it became ridiculous.” In the 90s, though, outright phone hacking was not that prevalent. Before digital-cell-phone technology became common, listening in on cell-phone conversations was done with scanners. It was, McMullan has said, why it was so easy for reporters to listen in on Princess Diana’s phone calls, for example. Just as widespread among newspapers, he says, was the use of private investigators to get unpublished phone numbers and addresses—and sometimes for such other “dark arts” as getting medical and financial records, and for surveillance.

McMullan says that Wade knew about the use of private investigators—“Impossible not to,” he says. “I was deputy features editor. I ran the same department that she did, and every week we’d see the bills from the private investigators: £2,000, £4,000.” However, he can’t be sure she always knew what they were doing.

“She was quite sweet in those days,” says McMullan. “She knew she was out of her depth and would rely on other people to make her shine. And, funnily enough, it was because she was so hopeless, we wanted to protect her as our boss when we would find out she didn’t know what she was doing,” he recalls. “So that worked, as one management style, if you like.”

“She’d get you to do things,” says another former News of the World reporter. “She had this charisma, this magnetic attraction,” he says. “She would praise to high heaven, make you feel like you were on top of the world. It was only afterwards that you realized you were manipulated.” In a largely male tabloid world—a business in which Brooks was once asked at a corporate golf gathering to sew a senior executive’s button back on his shirt, which she did—perceptions counted for a lot.

“She was very tactile, touching you on the arm, looking straight into your eyes as though there was no one more important in the room,” this former News reporter says. “From the way she acted, you would think she wanted to sleep with you.” But “no,” he says, “she didn’t want to sleep with the help; she was way too up the scale for that.”

She worked nonstop. “She was going at 150 all day,” this man recalls. “She was very intense. I thought she was a very insecure woman, actually, desperate for a lot of love and attention,” he says. “I was quite friendly with her at some point, as friendly as anyone can get with her, and in her quieter moments she would say, ‘No one loves me; I’m in a battle here.’ ” But even then, she was careful. Even out drinking after work, “she did not get pissed, ever. She never let her guard down,” and never spoke about her past. Like others, he wondered. “In the early days she used this accent, a girls’-school accent, meaning she’d been poshly educated, but every now and again the accent would slip and you’d realize: Oh, yeah.” There were rumors of a father who “was absent or who left,” of some kind of abandonment or “betrayal” that was felt deeply by her mother in particular, with whom Wade was, and still is, extremely close. But no one pressed.

Some believed her father was a vicar, or otherwise well-to-do, although, according to a copy of Brooks’s birth certificate, her father, John Robert Wade, was a tugboat deckhand. At some point, he became a gardener. In an interview with the BBC last summer, Brooks’s childhood friend Louise Weir would say that Brooks’s parents had a tree-pruning business that was so prosperous it afforded the family enviable vacations, and a personalized license plate for her mother, Deborah. When contacted, Weir was agitated, said she had been harassed by the media, and hung up the phone. But she told the BBC the Wades had been a churchgoing family. Rebekah, she said, was “a typical Gemini. She’s got her lovely fluffy side and her angry side She’s always been able to get what she wants out of people, even if they don’t really like her.”

In July 1996, a brief article appeared in the local Warrington Guardian. The occasion was Rebekah Wade’s engagement to Ross Kemp, whom she had met the year before at a golf tournament. The paper gushed about rumors that Wade’s engagement ring had cost $30,000. It also interviewed her father. John Wade was still living in Hatton, the small village where he and his then wife Deborah had been living when their daughter, Rebekah, was born. He said that he had no idea who Ross Kemp was, because he rarely watched television. However, he was “looking forward” to having Kemp visit him and his wife, Barbara, whom he’d married when Rebekah was 20. “The first time I knew of the engagement was when Rebekah rang to tell me she was getting married. It was quite a surprise,” he told the paper. Six weeks later, in September 1996, Wade died, at the age of 50. According to his death certificate, the cause was cirrhosis of the liver, so severe it had led to hepatic failure.

The Fantasy Daughter

When people who know Rupert Murdoch speak of his feelings for Rebekah Brooks, they use very emotional language: He “adores her,” “is devoted to her,” “is besotted with her.” The affection is clear in video clips and photographs of the two of them together—smiling into each other’s eyes, his arm around her, Brooks leaning in toward him. By most accounts, Rebekah Wade met Rupert Murdoch sometime in the mid-1990s, but it was not until the beginning of 1998 that people began to remark at how close they had become.

That January, Wade left the News of the World to become deputy editor of The Sun. It was a huge promotion—made by Murdoch despite the qualms of The Sun’s editor, Stuart Higgins. And almost from the moment she got that job, it was obvious to many that the job she wanted next was Higgins’s. Indeed, in May of that year Alastair Campbell, then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press secretary, wrote in his diary—which was later published as Power & the People—of an “odd” party that Wade gave at the Belvedere, in Holland Park, “where you felt Stuart was being prepared for departure and her for his job.” But the following month the editorship of The Sun went instead to David Yelland, the deputy editor of the New York Post. Although, as one former Blair adviser recalls, “she is too clever to have allowed herself to look insubordinate,” it was an open secret that she disliked Yelland, whose life, one News International executive recalls, “was made sort of miserable.” Two years later, in 2000, Murdoch once again promoted Wade. In a move that still baffles people, he suddenly fired Phil Hall, the respected editor of the News of the World, and gave his job to Wade. In 2003, when David Yelland resigned from The Sun, Murdoch installed Wade as the paper’s editor—the job, she would tell the staff on her first day, she had “dreamed of” ever since she was a child.


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Although Murdoch has four daughters, two of them grown, over the years he has seemed closer to Brooks than to any of them. She was, people say, like the fantasy daughter, the daughter he always wished he had—the one who never argued with him, who devoted her life to pleasing him. They reportedly swim together in the mornings when he is in London. She fusses over him at dinner parties—making sure he’s eating, that his wineglass is full. “She’s very attentive,” says one News International executive.

“When she wants someone, she will woo them so intensely—there will be invitations, the sharing of confidences,” says a former friend. “She wraps herself around you.” Much as she apparently learned to play golf because one of her bosses did, she learned to sail because Murdoch enjoyed sailing, as does his family, including his older son, Lachlan, on whose yacht Rebekah reportedly spent the New Year’s holiday in 2002.

“It isn’t just Rupert who is in love with her; it’s also James and the family,” says one former News Corp. executive who has known the Murdochs for decades. While her relationship with Murdoch’s younger son, James, became closer in late 2007, when he was put in charge of News International, Wade had been friends with Elisabeth for more than a decade. In 2001, she was not only a guest at Elisabeth’s wedding to Matthew Freud, but among a select group invited to her bridal shower. The two spent weekends together in Chipping Norton. “They were all over each other in the country,” says a friend. In many ways, Brooks had become a member of the Murdoch family, which, says one Murdoch executive, “has been key in her rise.”

If to some in the Murdoch empire she was “the impostor daughter,” Brooks did share, more than any of his actual children, one of Murdoch’s great passions. “She was the one who expressed his love for newspapers,” says one newspaper executive. While many at News Corp. would be happy to sell the newspapers, says one former executive, and Murdoch’s children have not appeared to share his enthusiasm for the business, Brooks was as passionate about newspapers as Murdoch. He saw her as a “great campaigning editor.” Indeed, he supported one of her most controversial campaigns, the 2000 “Name & Shame” series for the News of the World, which was prompted by the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by a registered sex offender. For two weeks, she published photographs, names, and the whereabouts of convicted pedophiles. In the process, she became very close to the child’s mother, Sara Payne, at one point giving her a company cell phone, which, according to investigators, may have been hacked, an allegation that Brooks said was “abhorrent.”

Murdoch loved Rebekah Wade’s “fantastic drive,” says one executive. More than anything, he loved the fact that her whole life was wrapped up in his beloved papers; when she was scooped by a rival, she could go into dark funks, so much so that on one occasion, when she was beaten to a story by the Mirror, Murdoch reportedly called Les Hinton, who at the time was the executive in charge of the U.K. newspaper business, to ask, “Is she all right?”

And at every turn, she gave him the papers he wanted. A co-founder of Women in Journalism, an organization to help promote women’s careers in the field, Wade—along with Murdoch’s former wife Anna—was reported to be personally offended by The Sun’s “Page 3,” which daily features photographs of bare-breasted women. But they were what Murdoch wanted, and so she continued to run the photos, and defended them roundly. In 2004, in response to criticisms of “Page 3” from Clare Short, a former Cabinet minister, Wade ran a “Hands Off Page 3” campaign which included running a photograph of Short’s head on a flabby, naked female body, and describing Short as “fat,” “ugly,” “short on looks,” and “short on brains.”

The Power and the Story

That July, six months after her savaging of Clare Short, Wade threw a 40th-birthday party for Ross Kemp. Cherie Blair came, as did Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the Exchequer, along with David Blunkett, the home secretary, and Lord Stevens, then chief of Scotland Yard. The star of Britain’s most popular television soap, Kemp was a big celebrity, and her relationship with him had helped catapult Wade into the limelight. But they had not come because of Kemp; the power now was hers—courtesy of Rupert Murdoch. At the News of the World and The Sun she ran not only two of Britain’s biggest newspapers but also ones that could, and did, destroy people’s lives and careers, frequently with a political agenda devoted to advancing Murdoch’s interests in Britain—particularly his profitable satellite-television business. The threat was always implicit: Stand in Murdoch’s way and the papers will retaliate. “Everybody was afraid,” says one prominent newspaper editor. To many it was “just a fact of life,” says this editor, “that you had to give in to them.” It was a fear that would reach into the highest levels of British politics, and among his many editors, none would be perceived as a more enthusiastic political partner to Murdoch than Wade.

She was not known to have strong political opinions. “Rebekah wore her politics lightly,” says one man, who adds that in the 15 years he has known her “I never heard her offer an opinion about anything in politics. She was interested in power.” And, it seemed, enjoyed wielding it.

She had gotten her first political toehold through Tony Blair—the prime minister now regarded as perhaps the most obsequious in his relationship to Murdoch. Wade met Blair through Kemp, who was a major Labour Party supporter and fund-raiser, but it was Alastair Campbell, an old friend of hers from his days as a tabloid journalist, who would really open doors to Downing Street for her. “The relationship between Alastair and Rebekah was a singularly close one,” recalls Lance Price, a former Blair spokesperson. Although she was just the deputy editor of the News of the World in 1997 when Blair was elected, largely because of Campbell, she had special access.

Wade became close to Blair and to his wife, Cherie—a “friendship” that would cool but continue even after the police discovered in 2002 that News reporters were planning to set Cherie up by taping a conversation between her and the boyfriend of her “life coach.” He had helped find the Blairs’ eldest son an apartment at a reduced price—an apparent favor to the prime minister, it eventually became a major story. The News would lambaste Cherie as “foolish” and “arrogant,” but Wade’s dinners and meetings with Tony Blair continued, perhaps encouraged by an editorial that appeared during her first week as editor of The Sun, a month after the swipe at his wife: “New Labour have had a good run for their money—your money, actually. But it’s time to say we’re very disappointed.” The Sun did not withdraw its backing for Blair; it was just a little reminder of who buttered his bread.

In a remarkable feat of social and emotional gymnastics, Wade would also become friendly with Gordon Brown. As chancellor of the Exchequer before he became prime minister, in 2007, Brown had a famously touchy relationship with Blair—which, according to Lord John Prescott, Wade deftly mined.

Deputy prime minister at the time, Prescott now recalls how “Rebekah Wade used to have dinner with Blair and Brown and play them off against each other.” He is still shocked at how easy it was. “If Blair wanted to know what Brown was doing, she’d fix the dinner up and then tell him,” he recalls. “They used to use her for intelligence on the other.” It was artful, he says, the way she made each man think that she was on his side. “I used to say, ‘Why are you listening to that bloody woman?’ It was all about Murdoch,” says Prescott, who is among the politicians who were hacked by the News—in his case, in 2006, following the exposure of an extramarital affair with his secretary.

As she did with Cherie Blair, Wade also became very close to Sarah Brown. It was something people would note—the intimacy of her friendships with the powerful as she befriended their husbands, wives, and children. That was “the nature of how she operates,” says Roy Greenslade. “She gets that close to people. It’s not simply a business thing—it’s a personal thing. It’s domestic.” But Wade’s friendship with the Browns did not stop her, in the fall of 2006, from phoning them with upsetting news. The Sun had discovered from an informant that the Browns’ infant son had cystic fibrosis, and the paper was going to run the story the next day. Which it did, on the cover, with the screaming headline chancellor’s baby has cystic fibrosis. The Browns, who had already lost a baby daughter and were still coming to terms with the news of their son’s illness, were devastated. It is this story—along with the revelation that Gordon Brown’s phone may have been hacked by the News of the World and his financial records accessed by Murdoch’s Sunday Times—that today particularly horrifies people. “If that doesn’t make your skin crawl, the evilness of it, what does?” says a Murdoch observer. It was a measure of Murdoch’s political power, and Rebekah Wade’s, that Gordon Brown was among the guests at her wedding three years later.


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Not that this bit of fealty made any difference. That September, on the day Brown was to make a major speech, The Sun’s headline would read: labour’s lost it. The Sun’s sudden switch of allegiance from the Labour Party to David Cameron’s Conservatives shocked the British political establishment. To some, it was a typically cynical Murdochian move of backing the likely winner, but by then Brooks had also grown very close to Cameron, according to a friend of both Brooks’s and Cameron’s. Her deputy—then successor—at the News, and her close friend, Andy Coulson, had gone to work as Cameron’s media adviser after resigning from the News in 2007 following the hacking convictions of the paper’s royals editor, Clive Goodman, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. The Conservative leader was also Brooks’s neighbor in Oxfordshire, and Charlie Brooks had gone to Eton with Cameron’s brother. Cameron dined at the Brooks’s home on weekends. And he was a guest at the annual New Year’s Eve bash, thrown by the Brookses with several other couples from the Oxfordshire set.

Within a week of Cameron’s election, in May 2010, Rupert Murdoch paid a visit to 10 Downing Street for a private meeting with the new prime minister. In July he visited again, shortly after his company made its bid to control BSkyB. What they discussed is anybody’s guess, but that same month Cameron’s administration criticized the BBC—the chief competitor to Murdoch’s BSkyB and a longtime Murdoch bête noire—for “extraordinary and outrageous” waste and proposed reducing its budget.

Absence and Malice

In the spring of 2009, Wade divorced Kemp. They had been separated for nearly two and a half years. In court papers, Kemp reportedly admitted to infidelity. “The relationship with Ross was very stressful,” says a friend. The tensions had briefly made headlines in 2005—and caused much giggling in London—when Rebekah was arrested at four in the morning for assaulting Kemp and giving him a fat lip. No charges were filed, and, as the press reported, she emerged from an eight-hour stint in jail and went straight to the office—wearing a designer suit Rupert Murdoch had sent to the police station.

By then, Wade’s relationship with Murdoch had become “an issue,” says one executive. “She could say and do what she liked,” this person says. As she rose up the ranks, she had become increasingly imperious. She could be rude and abrasive, in one instance reportedly throwing an ashtray at the staff on the newsdesk when a rival paper scooped them. “She was intimidating,” says this executive. “She deeply resented certain people and was ruthless,” says another, who recalls being warned by his boss “not to cross Rebekah.” As far back as 2001, “the power had gone to her head,” says Paul McMullan, who resigned from the News of the World late that year. “She became Cruella de Vil. I didn’t need that.”

What many former staffers now say is that, under Wade, the pressures on the newsroom were intense, particularly at the News. As her deputy, Andy Coulson was as driven and competitive as she was, and he set the pace of the office even while Wade was editor. Unlike most tabloid editors, who constantly roamed their newsrooms, she was frequently away, meeting and dining with politicians and other influential people. One of her dinner partners, according to a former police investigator, was John Yates, the senior Scotland Yard official who was forced to resign last summer, in large part due to the fact that, in 2009, he told Parliament that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the News in the files seized from Mulcaire—the same files that investigators for a judicial-review committee recently determined contained evidence that the phones of 5,795 people may have been hacked by some 28 News employees.

Wade’s absence from the newsroom may have set up a situation where things could occur that she didn’t know about. She was on vacation in April 2002 when the News of the World published the first story that referenced messages that had been left on Milly Dowler’s cell phone. The story was quickly pulled and re-written, which is why many people didn’t notice it then—including Brooks, who told Parliament in July that vetting the story’s sourcing would have been the responsibility of her subordinates. Paul McMullan, who was covering the Dowler story for the Sunday Express, is among those who believe that Brooks was probably accurate on this point. “I don’t think they’d have bothered telling her, ‘This is where we got it from.’ ” Roy Greenslade says it is “possible that, although she should have known [that hacking was going on], she genuinely didn’t know, because I don’t think she knew how stories arrived most of the time.” Or what her staff was doing.

Today, the accusations against News International go way beyond anything that Brooks would have had responsibility for as the editor of The Sun and the News of the World. As of mid-December, 19 people have been arrested, nearly all in connection with allegations of either hacking, bribes paid to police, or both. Among those was Andy Coulson, who was forced to resign from Cameron’s government in January 2011. In recent public testimony Paul McMullan alleged that Coulson not only knew about phone hacking but “brought the practice wholesale with him when he became deputy editor” of the News, and called Brooks and Coulson “the scum of journalism.” Politicians and lawyers investigating News International describe a company whose entire culture may have been corrupted by an ingrained sense that they were above the law, that they could get away with anything. Which made believable recent testimony by the singer Charlotte Church that—despite the denials of her agent that she was offered a fee—when she was 13, she gave up $159,000 for performing at Murdoch’s 1999 wedding to Wendi Deng in expectation of favorable treatment by his papers. And yet, his tabloids would hound Church and her family, to the point that, she said, her mother attempted suicide. Among the harshest characterizations would come from the Labour M.P. Tom Watson, one of Murdoch’s leading critics, who in a November parliamentary hearing referred to News International as “a criminal enterprise.”

But if Brooks didn’t know about the alleged wrongdoing when it occurred, her elevation in June 2009 to C.E.O. put her in the position, many believe, where, if she didn’t know then, she should have.

That June, though, it seemed as though everything had come together perfectly for Brooks. In the 18 months since James Murdoch had taken the helm at News International, she had made herself as indispensable to him as she had to his father, and, with Rupert Murdoch’s blessing, James had rewarded her with the promotion to C.E.O. On the personal front as well, she was said by friends to be “blissful” in her relationship with Charlie Brooks. If Kemp, as one friend says, had been “the perfect husband for a tabloid editor,” Brooks was “the perfect husband for a C.E.O.” Although his family was not as wealthy as it had once been, the Brookses were genuinely “posh,” listed in Burke’s Peerage and said to be descendants of the 14th-century king Edward III.

Five years older than Wade, Brooks, now 48, had never been married when the two met at the Chipping Norton home of a mutual friend. They began seeing each other in early 2007. Warm, easygoing, and unambitious, Brooks was, according to friends, Wade’s opposite, and a perfect foil for her intensity. He’d been a racehorse trainer, dabbled in sports marketing, and run a mail-order sex-toy company. He had also tried his hand at writing, and in April 2009 came out with his first novel, Citizen, which was published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins.

Brooks, friends say, was devoted to Wade. And she to him. She was stunned, one friend recalls, when Brooks handed her his BlackBerry one day, and asked her to see if the tech specialists at News International could repair it. “She felt quite fantastic to have somebody who had no secrets,” says this friend, “someone she could trust completely” and “somebody who trusted her.” People were surprised when Wade took Brooks’s name after their wedding—something she had not done during her marriage to Kemp. Overnight, Rebekah Wade was gone, replaced by “Mrs. Brooks.”

The first sign of trouble came four weeks after her wedding. On July 8, The Guardian revealed that News International had made payments of more than $2 million to several people to settle claims that their phones had been hacked—including Gordon Taylor, the head of the football players’ union. It was the first public indication that the hacking had gone beyond one “rogue” reporter, as News International had referred to Clive Goodman, the former royals editor, who had been convicted of hacking the phones of members of the royal family. In a letter to Parliament, Brooks took issue with that story and other revelations in The Guardian, which, she wrote, “has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public.”


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During the next two years she would staunchly defend News International. When Parliament invited her to testify in late 2009, she declined. Even after it issued a report in early 2010 assailing News International executives for their “collective amnesia” in their repeated denials of widespread hacking, she stood firm. She revealed nothing about the growing tensions within News International, particularly as the relationship between Rupert and James began to fray. Described by sources close to the Murdochs as the “go-between” in an increasingly fraught father-son relationship, Brooks was now under pressure to please and protect not only Rupert but also James, who had both taken the position that they had no idea what was going on inside their company, and particularly James, passing blame on to subordinates.

Family Affair

In May 2010, according to testimony by James, News International’s chief attorney, Tom Crone, authorized the use of a private investigator to follow Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, two lawyers who represented the growing number of hacking victims who were suing the company— Lewis going on to represent Milly Dowler’s parents. The surveillance was part of an effort to get dirt on the lawyers’ private lives. Although Brooks is said to have been close to Crone, and he reported directly to her, there has been no suggestion that she knew about this—or about the surveillance of News International’s big critic, the Labour M.P. Tom Watson, which took place in the fall of 2009.

But she appears to have known, as far back as 2006, that the hacking at the News of the World went beyond one “rogue” reporter who covered the royal family. As she told Parliament in July, that was when the police informed her that as editor of The Sun she, too, had been hacked by the News, a fact she said she relayed to News International executives at the time.

By February 2010, Brooks may have understood that the hacking was even more widespread. That month she quietly arranged a $1 million payout to Max Clifford, a veteran London P.R. agent who was suing News International for hacking—not only putting an end to his lawsuit against the company, but also preventing the public disclosure, ordered by a judge, of evidence of more extensive hacking.

Recently, Neville Thurlbeck, one of the News reporters implicated in the hacking scandal, said that in July 2009 he had prepared “a dossier” which implicated “an executive.” He claimed he had tried to get the file to James Murdoch and to Brooks but was rebuffed by people close to them. “I had a warm and trusting relationship with Rebekah,” he wrote in an article for the Press Gazette in November, blaming himself for not trying harder to get his dossier to Brooks. If this account is accurate, then—considering Thurlbeck’s key role in the hacking scandal and the investigations—what is striking is that Brooks does not appear to have ever spoken to him.

She does, however, appear to have spoken to a Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent named David Cook. Although she would tell Parliament in July that she did not recall the meeting, it seems from published reports and interviews with Cook himself and his attorney, Mark Lewis, that the meeting took place in early January 2003. Cook was the lead investigator in a brutal unsolved murder of a private investigator who had been found with an ax in his head in 1987. Cook had asked for the meeting because, several months earlier, his family had been followed and photographed by people hired by the News of the World. Cook’s mail had also been tampered with. The police investigation had allegedly found evidence that the surveillance had been ordered by one of the News’s top editors, Alex Marunchak, as a favor to two of the suspects in the case: Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, private investigators whose firm, Southern Investigations, had worked for the News.

The firm also did work for numerous media outlets, and the meeting shines a light on the questions that have been raised today, both in Parliament and in a government judicial review, about the practices and ethics of the British press in general. There is no evidence that Brooks had any prior knowledge of what was going on, but the police suspected that “News of the World staff were guilty of interference and party to using unlawful means to attempt to discredit a police officer and his wife,” according to the M.P. Tom Watson.

When Brooks heard from Cook about the surveillance, her response, Cook says, was that she had no idea that it had gone on, but if so it was “in the public interest”—a common justification used by the media in Britain for many of the more questionable reporting practices and privacy intrusions. This, she said, was because Cook was rumored to be having an affair with a television personality, a remarkable response considering that the woman, Jacqui Hames, was Cook’s wife.

Brooks also told Parliament in July that she had not heard of the private investigator Jonathan Rees until a few months earlier. “She sat there in front of that parliamentary committee and said she couldn’t remember what happened,” says Cook, who insists that during his 2003 meeting with Brooks he specifically mentioned Jonathan Rees. He also says that he read her a witness statement that alleged that in the late 80s—before Brooks worked at News International—Southern Investigations had paid some of Alex Marunchak’s credit-card bills and the school tuition for one of his children. According to Cook, Brooks “became very defensive about Marunchak, saying how since he’d moved to the Irish desk, sales there had gone up and he was doing such a great job.” Cook says he was stunned, but he didn’t press any further. He recalls “being told beforehand by a senior officer, ‘Remember, she is very close to Sir John Stevens,’ ” then the head of Scotland Yard. “I took that as a warning,” says Cook.

What Brooks did next isn’t clear. In September, Tom Crone, the top lawyer at News International, told Parliament that he was never aware of the surveillance of David Cook, which would suggest that she did not inform her legal manager about the meeting. There does not appear to have been any reaction at the News of the World. Marunchak remained at the paper until 2006. Jonathan Rees was rehired by the News in 2005 when he was released from prison after serving time for planting cocaine on a client’s wife. And recently Cook learned that his phone had been hacked by Glenn Mulcaire, who allegedly may have also been commissioned by one of Brooks’s editors to search his financial records.

Rebekah Brooks may have simply forgotten the meeting. Just five days after it took place, she left the News of the World to become the editor of The Sun, the job she’d wanted so badly. In all the excitement of ambition rewarded, her interest in the murky activities of her staff may have waned.

Right to the end, Rupert Murdoch stood by her. It was only under “intense pressure,” says a family confidante, that he finally caved in and accepted her resignation on July 15, reportedly telling her to just take a “leave, travel around the world.” As it was, her severance of $2.7 million would cause yet more ire, along with the fact that she still has her chauffeur-driven Mercedes, courtesy of News International, along with an office in downtown London. If she was the perfect daughter, Murdoch was the perfect father. But his loyalty to Brooks, and that of his family—James in particular, who finds himself under increasing scrutiny—will be tested as the investigation, which seems to yield new revelations daily, intensifies.

Off to the Races

For Brooks, there was a brief period of depression in the wake of the arrest, friends say, a spell of humiliation, when she refused invitations and remained almost secluded at her home in Oxfordshire, venturing out only with her trademark hair rolled into a bun so people wouldn’t recognize her. But that flirtation with pain and the possibility of failure may be ending. In late November, Brooks was photographed—holding a copy of The Sun, no less—at the Newbury races with Charlie, who has recently announced his return to the horse-training business. And she has re-appeared on the dinner circuit, where, if the hacking scandal is mentioned, Brooks is now among the “victims”—obviously, says one loyal friend, “because she was hacked more than anybody else.” And there are signs that she will soon be emerging publicly in a philanthropic role, as suggested by a story that made its way into the British papers in November about her lunch at Boisdale, in Belgravia, with General Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the British military, to discuss plans for a February charity event.


Continued (page 6 of 6)



But she’s not off the hook yet. There may be more inquiries and litigation ahead, and Brooks is still awaiting the outcome of the police investigation, rage near her home the day after she was arrested. Charlie Brooks said they were his, yet five months later, the police had still refused to release them.

And then there is the baby. As her public-relations firm, Bell Pottinger, announced recently, Rebekah and Charlie Brooks are to be the proud parents of a baby girl, due next month via a surrogate mother, rumored to be a relative. Some critics question the timing of the annoucement, seeing it as a bid by Rebekah Brooks to gain sympathy, but they are being churlish. Having a baby, friends say, has, like having the editorship of The Sun, long been one of her ambitions.

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THERE IS A PROGRAMME ON AT 8PM ON CH4 ABOUT MURDOCH AND CAMERON.

Ed Milliband at Leveson:

Miliband describes evidence by the parents of Madeleine McCann to the inquiry as "chilling" and says press coverage of them breached almost all of the PCC editors' code.

It may not have been illegal, but that does not lessen the intrusion, he adds.

========================

The PCC offered to step in but needed the McCanns to requested it. They chose to go for the money and sue the papers instead

chrissie wrote:Ed Milliband at Leveson:

Miliband describes evidence by the parents of Madeleine McCann to the inquiry as "chilling" and says press coverage of them breached almost all of the PCC editors' code.

It may not have been illegal, but that does not lessen the intrusion, he adds.

========================

The PCC offered to step in but needed the McCanns to requested it. They chose to go for the money and sue the papers instead

Hi chrissie, I saw a snippet of the John Major being interviewed and he said he was blatantly told by Murdoch that if he didn't alter his stance on Europe
he would not be elected........which he was ,in spite of this threat!!! I saw , for the fist time, the appearance of the McCanns at the enquiry , thanks to HideHo and Gerry looked decidedly uncomfortable , Kate looked bored, but did manage a couple of sentences. I don't think they fooled Leveson or
the Interviewer.

I just caught the tail end of Rebekah and her Husband leaving the Court and she stopped to make a brief statement to the waiting crowd , again
stating her innocence which will be proved. she and the others are to appear at Southwark Crown Court next Friday..

6:01am UK, Thursday June 14, 2012

Jon Craig, chief political correspondent

David Cameron will face embarrassing questions today about wining and dining with Murdoch executives, including former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, when he gives evidence at the Leveson inquiry.
The Prime Minister will also be quizzed about his controversial decision to recruit Andy Coulson, the former News Of The World editor, as No 10 communications director after he had resigned from the paper over the phone-hacking scandal.

Mr Cameron's long awaited appearance at Leveson comes after the Government defeated a Labour move in the Commons for Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to be referred to the PM's independent adviser on ministerial standards over his handling of News Corporation's bid for BSkyB.



The PM will be quizzed over his meetings with Rebekah Brooks

The Government's victory came after Mr Cameron told MPs that his adviser, Sir Alex Allan, had written to him to say that he could not "usefully add to the facts" in the Hunt case uncovered by the Leveson Inquiry into media standards.

Labour dismissed Mr Cameron's comments as an ineffective "smokescreen" and said that the Prime Minister's judgment in appointing Mr Hunt to a quasi-judicial role in the BSkyB bid was in question.

:: Read more on the Leveson inquiry on our dedicated page

Senior Government insiders claim that when he appears before Lord Justice Leveson Mr Cameron will make clear that the Government will not adopt new plans for regulating the press that stifle freedom of speech.

The Prime Minister is expected to follow the tone of Education Secretary Michael Gove, a fierce critic of the Leveson inquiry, by stressing that Press freedom must be preserved at all costs.

But Mr Cameron's evidence is likely to be dominated by five key questions:

1. Did he ask Mr Coulson about phone-hacking before hiring him? If not, why not?

2. Why wasn't Mr Coulson given full security vetting?

3. Why did he hand Jeremy Hunt quasi-judicial responsibility for the BSkyB bid after he had written a memo to the Prime Minister supporting it?

4. Did he ever discuss phone-hacking with Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks or any other News International executives? And if not, why not?

5. Did Rupert Murdoch ever pressure him to change government policy?




Mr Cameron is expected to face probing questions about his friendship with former newspaper boss Rebekah Brooks, after she said he texted her regularly and often signed off his text messages to her with 'LOL', which he wrongly believed stood for 'lots of love'.

The Prime Minister has also been forced to confess that he rode her horse Raisa with Mrs Brooks's husband Charlie, which was lent to her by the Metropolitan Police between 2008 and 2010, and that he went to her house in the Cotswolds for Christmas dinner.

The Prime Minister's allies claim he wants to put the record straight, as he sees it, over the decision not to subject his former spin doctor Mr Coulson to "developed vetting" (DV) - the higher form of security clearance - after he entered Downing Street following the general election.

He has said the reason why Mr Coulson was not subject to DV was that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the No 10 permanent secretary in 2010, wanted to restrict the access of politically appointed special advisers handling communications to sensitive material.

But Mr Heywood changed this after a terror alert at East Midlands airport in October 2010.

http://news.sky.com/home/

Click on link to get live sky video on Cameron appearance.

Breaking News. 3 more arrests of News International Staff, one 31 yr old from The Sun.....all accused of bribing Public Officials.

Asked about his controversial decision to recruit Mr Coulson, Mr Cameron said he sought specific assurances over the issue, before hiring the former tabloid editor in 2007.

A few months earlier Mr Coulson had resigned from the News of the World after the conviction of the newspaper's royal editor and a private investigator for hacking into the voicemail messages of royal aides.

The Prime Minister said he met Mr Coulson in March 2007 at his Westminster offices.

"I raised the issue of phone hacking and sought the assurance in the face to face meeting we had in my office," he told the inquiry.

"I knew it was very important to ask him that question and I did so."



David Cameron arriving at the Royal Courts of Justice

Mr Cameron admitted he knew the appointment of Mr Coulson was controversial because of what had happened at the Sunday newspaper and because he had been a tabloid editor.

The Prime Minister said: "I was giving him a second chance.

"He did the job very effectively... there weren't any complaints about the way he conducted himself. He ran a very effective team."

Mr Cameron said although he had been advised by some not to hire Mr Coulson, he "needed someone tough and robust".

He told Inquiry Counsel Robert Jay QC that the decision rested with him, and he took responsibility for it, saying: "You don't make decisions with 20/20 hindsight... you don't try to run away from it."

The Prime Minister said that if he had been lied to, then so had the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, a parliamentary select committee and many others who had accepted those assurances.

He added: "If someone had given me evidence he knew about phone-hacking, I wouldn't have employed him and I would have fired him."

:: Read more on the Leveson inquiry on our dedicated page

The hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London was also shown more evidence about the close relationship between Mr Cameron and Mrs Brooks.

A text message between the pair was read to the inquiry.

Sent by Mrs Brooks on the eve of Mr Cameron's speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2009 and just days after The Sun switched its support to his party from Labour, it said: "I'm so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we are in this together. Speech of your life? Yes he Cam!"

Asked to explain the message, Mr Cameron said: "The Sun had made this decision to back the Conservatives, to part company with Labour.

"The Sun wanted to make sure it was helping the Conservative Party put its best foot forward with the policies we were announcing, the speech I was making. That's what that means."



The PM was quizzed over his meetings with Rebekah Brooks

He went on: "We were friends. But professionally, me as leader of the Conservative Party, her in newspapers, we were going to be pushing the same political agenda."

Mr Cameron acknowledged Mrs Brooks was a close friend.

He said their friendship had grown closer in recent years after the former tabloid editor married his neighbour, racehorse trainer and fellow old Etonian Charlie Brooks.

Earlier this week, Gordon Brown told the Leveson Inquiry he believed the Tories supported Mr Murdoch's plans to re-shape British media, including a bid to take over BSkyB.

The former Labour prime minister claimed in his evidence that there had been an "express deal" to cut funding to the BBC and media regulator Ofcom in return for more political support from News International titles.

He also suggested a deal might have been struck to hand full control of BSkyB to News Corporation.

But, visibly rattled, David Cameron told Lord Justice Leveson: "There was no overt deal for support, there was no covert deal, there were no nods and winks."

After weeks of controversy surrounding Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's handling of the BSkyB bid, Mr Cameron went on to say: "There was a Conservative politician - me - trying to win over newspapers, trying to win over television, trying to win over proprietors, but not trading policies for that support."

Mr Cameron said the allegation was an "absolute nonsense from start to finish".

He accused Mr Brown of being angry about The Sun deserting him and of cooking up "a completely specious conspiracy theory".

:: The Brooks' are among a group of people charged in relation to an alleged attempt to cover-up phone hacking and other criminality at the News of World.

The couple made their first court appearance on Wednesday.

THERE ARE ALLEGATIONS OF COMPUTER HACKING CONCERNING MR SHERIDAN TRIAL IN SCOTLAND.

13 June 2012 Last updated at 12:56 Share this pageEmail Print Share this page

Ex-News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has appeared in court to face charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

She, her husband Charlie Brooks and four others have been bailed for a fortnight.

They appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on charges linked to the phone hacking scandal.

Mrs Brooks, 44, who faces three charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, was bailed until 22 June.

Her husband Mr Brooks, 49, and four former colleagues, who each face one charge of the same offence, were bailed to the same date to appear at Southwark Crown Court.

Mrs Brooks, 44, was charged last month by detectives from Operation Weeting, Scotland Yard's phone-hacking inquiry.

Continue reading the main story
At the scene

Danny Shaw

Home affairs correspondent, BBC News

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The former Sun and News of the World Editor swept into the building through a sliding door, bypassing a long queue on the other side.

At about 10:20 Rebekah Brooks walked into Court Number One, on the first floor.

Looking relaxed, she took her seat in the glass-panelled dock, beside her husband Charlie Brooks and former PA Cheryl Carter.

As they waited for the proceedings to begin, Mr and Mrs Brooks smiled and chatted.

And when the eight-minute hearing was over, the couple left the court building, all smiles again.

The offences, which she denies, allegedly occurred in July last year.

Mrs Brooks is accused of conspiring to conceal documents, computers and electronic equipment from police and conspiring to remove seven boxes of material from the archive of News International.

That same month, David Cameron ordered an inquiry into press standards, the News of the World was closed down and Mrs Brooks resigned from News International.

Also in court was Mrs Brooks' former personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, 48, Mark Hanna, 49, head of security at News International; Paul Edwards, 47, Mrs Brooks' chauffeur; and security consultant Daryl Jorsling, 39, who each face a single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

District Judge Howard Riddle told the defendants they would go on trial at a later date at Southwark Crown Court and they must attend the next hearing on 22 June.

He said: "You should be there no later than 9.30am. If you do not turn up on time you commit an offence and lose your bail, and in some circumstances the trial could continue in your absence."

June 18 (Reuters) - News Corp's Management and Standards Committee, which is investigating the aftermath of the media conglomerate's phone hacking scandal, will now report to the company's top lawyer, Gerson Zweifach, News Corp said on Monday.

The committee previously had reported to Joel Klein, who will now focus on his full-time role as chief executive of News Corp's fledgling education division.

Zweifach, who joined the company in January, will report on behalf of the Standards committee to News Corp's independent directors through Viet Dinh, who chairs News Corp's nominating and corporate governance committee.

The Management and Standards Committee was set up as an independent internal body in the wake of phone hacking scandal at News Corp's British tabloids. The committee has turned over thousands of emails and computers to British police who are investigating the affair.

Could this be a sign that Newscorp is worried about something????

A VITAL IPHONE HAS BEEN LOST BY NEWS INTERNATIONAL,TALKING ABOUT IT ON SKY NEWS RIGHT NOW.

1:20am UK, Saturday June 23, 2012

Martin Brunt, crime correspondent

Former News International boss Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie have made their first appearance in a crown court on phone-hacking charges.
The couple stood side-by-side in the glass dock with four others, all of them charged with a conspiracy to cover up evidence of phone-hacking.

They spoke only to acknowledge their names, before their lawyers spent 30 minutes discussing the next legal moves.

They will be asked to give pleas - guilty or not guilty - to the charges at another hearing on September 26.

Mrs Brooks, 44, faces three charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice by removing boxes of material from the News International archive.

The charges allege she tried to hide documents, computers and other material from Scotland Yard detectives investigating phone hacking and corruption of public officials.

Her husband Charlie, 49, a racehorse trainer, faces one similar charge.

Also facing one charge are Mrs Brooks' former PA Cheryl Carter, her ex-chauffeur Paul Edwards, News International's head of security Mark Hanna and security consultant Daryl Jorsling.

All were remanded on bail.



The pair do not have to plea guilty or not guilty until a hearing in September

Two worlds apart: Rebekah Brooks told she may face separate charges over phone hacking as old boss Rupert Murdoch suns himself abroad

Rupert Murdoch appeared without a care in the world as he took a ride in a gondola with his family in Venice over the weekend
He and Wendi Deng also found time to relax aboard his £190,000 yacht
The former News International boss again wears Christian Louboutin heels and tight black pencil dress
She looked weary as she listened to the charges alongside husband Charlie
Trial date will not be set until court learns if she will face further charges

By Matt Blake

PUBLISHED: 09:32 GMT, 22 June 2012 | UPDATED: 00:36 GMT, 23 June 2012

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More charges? Wearing a tight fitting black pencil dress with four inch Christian Louboutin heels the weary-looking Rebekah Brooks arrived at Southwark Crown Court for the first hearing

More charges? Wearing a tight fitting black pencil dress with four inch Christian Louboutin heels the weary-looking Rebekah Brooks arrived at Southwark Crown Court for the first hearing

They were once the king and princess of a blossoming media empire.

But the lives of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks now couldn't have appeared further apart.

While she appeared in court charged with perverting the course of justice today, the News Corp mogul appeared without a care in the world as he soaked up the sun aboard a gondola on a family holiday in Venice last week.

Wearing a tight-fitting black pencil dress with four-inch Christian Louboutin heels, the 44-year old looked weary as she arrived at Southwark Crown Court with husband Charlie to be told she may be charged with further offences in relation to Scotland Yard's probe into phone hacking.

But for the global media mogul, who is now in New York, the plight of his flame-haired former protegee appeared but a distant memory as he relaxed 1,000 miles away on his family holiday.

He strolled the sun-drenched Venetian canal walks, laughing with wife Wendi Deng and their young daughters, Grace Helen, 11, and nine-year-old Chloe.

They even had time to relax on his £190,000 Rosehearty superyacht in the crystal waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Back in London, Mrs Brooks sat stoney faced with Charlie and their four co-defendants.

A trial date for the allegations that she hid documents and computers from detectives investigating hacking and bribing public officials was not set after the court heard that she is due to learn if she is to be charged with further offences in relation to the Met's Operation Weeting.

Brooks, her husband Charlie and four of her former entourage are now not expected to indicate their pleas until September after she answers bail to hear her fate in relation to the other allegations.

The 44-year-old listened intently as the dates for the case against her were set down in the courtroom packed with journalists'.

Scroll down for video.
Simple life: More than 1,000 miles away, her former boss and trusted mentor Rupert Murdoch appeared without a care in the world as he soaked up the sun aboard a gondola on a family holiday in Venice last weekend

Simple life: More than 1,000 miles away, her former boss and trusted mentor Rupert Murdoch appeared without a care in the world as he soaked up the sun aboard a gondola on a family holiday in Venice last weekend
For the world media mogul, the plight of his flame-haired former protegee appeared a distant memory.
For the world media mogul, the plight of his flame-haired former protegee appeared a distant memory.

Rebekah who? For the global media mogul, the plight of his flame-haired former protegee appeared but a distant memory as he strolled the sun-drenched Venetian canal walks laughing with wife Wendi Deng and their young daughters

She appeared at Southwark Crown Court today alongside her racehorse trainer husband, 49, her former PA Cheryl Carter, 48, News Internationals Head of Security Mark Hanna, 49, her ex-chauffeur Paul Edwards, 48, security consultant Daryl Jorsling, 39. They are the first to face court over the hacking scandal.

Brooks schemed to remove boxes of archive records from the Murdoch company headquarters, concealed material and hid documents, computers and other electronic equipment from detectives investigating both phone hacking and the bribery of public officials, it is claimed.

She faces three charges of perverting the course of justice while the other four in the crowded dock face a single charge each.
Luxury lifestyle: Rupert and wife Wendi Deng even had time to relax on his £190,000 Rosehearty superyacht in the crystal waters of the Mediterranean Sea

Luxury lifestyle: Rupert and wife Wendi Deng even had time to relax on his £190,000 Rosehearty superyacht in the crystal waters of the Mediterranean Sea
Fun times: Rupert Murdoch's daughter Chloe swings from the yacht on holiday with her family

Fun times: Rupert Murdoch's daughter Chloe swings from the yacht on holiday with her family

Andrew Edis QC, prosecuting, said: 'So far as Mrs Brooks is concerned it is well known that there are bail dates coming up in context of another investigation known as Operation Weeting at the end of July or in early August.

'No definitive timetable has been set out for any charging decision whether yes or no, nevertheless it is likely that if there is a charge in relation to her that might impact on this case if there isn't that might also.

'If there were to be charges then consideration might have to be given to the format of this whole trial, who is to be involved and how many trials and so on.'
Artist's impression: Mrs Brooks appeared alongside (from right) her husband Charlie, security consultant Daryl Jorsling, her former PA Cheryl Carter, her ex-chauffeur Paul Edwards and former NI Head of Security Mark Hanna

Artist's impression: Mrs Brooks appeared alongside (from right) her husband Charlie, security consultant Daryl Jorsling, her former PA Cheryl Carter, her ex-chauffeur Paul Edwards and former NI Head of Security Mark Hanna
Worlds apart: Back in London, Mrs Brooks faced the media circus that has followed her since being charged with plotting to pervert the course of justice in May

Worlds apart: Back in London, Mrs Brooks faced the media circus that has followed her since being charged with plotting to pervert the course of justice in May

Together: The former queen of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire arrived with her racehorse trainer husband Charlie

Together: The former queen of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire arrived with her racehorse trainer husband Charlie

Trial Judge Mr Justice Fulford agreed: 'You need to know if this trial as it is currently constituted is going to take place.'

Mr Edis said they hoped for a decision on further charges by August 22 but could not guarantee it and may need to extend the time. He added: 'We are confident that the decision will be taken in time for this case to proceed smoothly.'
The PA: Mrs Brooks' former PA Cheryl Carter arrives at Southwark Crown Court to face her single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice
Mark Hanna, the former head of security at News International pictured leaving Southwark Crown Court today

The PA and the security chief: Mrs Brooks' former PA Cheryl Carter and NI's former head of security Mark Hanna arrive at Southwark Crown Court to face their single charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice

Brooks has hired Hugo Keith QC who represented the coroner at the 7/7 inquest and the government in the Shrien Dewani extradition hearing to represent her.

He pointed out that it is not known for sure that any of the files relating to 11 journalists handed by Operation Weeting detectives related to Brooks.
Well turned out: Rebekah Brooks looked a far cry from the smiling and confident power dresser that strode into Westminster Magistrates' Court a fortnight ago for the first hearing (above)

Well turned out: Rebekah Brooks looked a far cry from the smiling and confident power dresser that strode into Westminster Magistrates' Court a fortnight ago for the first hearing (above)

He handed a bundle of press cuttings to the judge for his attention, explaining: 'There have been certain sites, blogs and the like where there has been some extremely offensive, unpleasant and prejudical commentary.'

The first charge relating to the current case alleges that between July 6 and 19 last year she conspired with her husband, Carter, 48, News Internationals Head of Security Mark Hanna, 49, her chauffeur Paul Edwards, 48, her security consultant Daryl Jorsling, 39, and others to conceal material from officers of the Metropolitan Police Service.

The second charge claims that she and Carter between July 6 and 9 2011 conspired to remove seven boxes of material from the New International archives.

The final charge alleges that Brooks and her husband along with Hanna, Edwards, Jorsling, and others conspired to conceal documents, computers and other electronic equipment from Met officers between July 15 and 19 2011.

Although all six are named in the first charge only Brooks is facing prosecution in relation to it.

She sat on the end of the row in the dock next to her husband Charlie, who went to Eton with Prime Minister David Cameron who was a close friend of the couple and they chatted and laughed as they waited for the judge.

Wearing a navy suit with a white shirt and pink he stared at the judge and made brief notes during the 30 minute hearing.

In a public statement after they were charged the couple, of Churchill, Oxfordshire, condemned the decision as a 'witch hunt' and said they would fight the charges.

They were all released on bail with conditions including that they could not contact their co-accused to return for pleas in September.

Brooks edited the News of the World from 2000 before taking the helm at The Sun in 2003. In 2009 she became chief executive of News International then quit her post last July in the same month the alleged criminality took place.

Days after she quit she was arrested over allegations of phone-hacking and corruption after a bag containing a laptop, iPhone and paperwork was found in a bin near her £1.5 million home in London's exclusive Chelsea Harbour.

In the same month Murdoch closed down the News of the World after public fury over allegations the paper had hacked the email of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
NEWS INTERNATIONAL FACES FURTHER PHONE-HACKING CLAIMS

Newspaper bosses are facing more damages claims following allegations that tabloid journalists hacked phones, a High Court judge heard today.

A lawyer told Mr Justice Vos that 50 claims against News Group Newspapers are currently itemised on a register.

But he indicated that about 20 more claims are set to be added to that list.

Dozens sued in the wake of allegations that journalists at the now-defunct News of the World newspaper, which was owned by News Group, hacked phones.

A trial is scheduled to start at the High Court in London in February.

Hugh Tomlinson QC, who represents a number of claimants seeking damages, outlined the latest damages claims at a High Court hearing in London.

'There are 50 issued claims,' he said. 'I understand that there are another 20-odd about to be placed on the register.'

Meanwhile, the High Court was today told News International lawyers are examining iPhones thought to have been used by company executives.

A barrister representing claimants said the existence of the News International iPhones emerged as a result of evidence given to the Leveson Inquiry.

David Sherborne told Mr Justice Vos that evidence was 'contrary' to previous evidence given to the High Court.

Mr Justice Vos said 'new' material found on the iPhones should be disclosed.

He told lawyers: 'If there is material that is new or is likely to be new then it should be disclosed.'

No detail was given in court about the iPhones or their users.

Mr Justice Vos was told about the iPhones at a hearing earlier this month.

Lawyers representing claimants said evidence suggested that the iPhones were used 'during the relevant period'.

The judge said who used the iPhones and what they were used for would be 'open for discussion'.


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