Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the News Of The World when the paper allegedly hacked Milly Dowler's phone, has said she first heard about the claims two weeks ago.

Speaking at a Commons committee hearing, Mrs Brooks denied any knowledge of the allegations before they appeared in the press.
It is claimed she was at the helm when the murdered schoolgirl's voicemails were illegally accessed by the tabloid following her abduction in 2002.
Mrs Brooks, said she found it "staggering to believe" that anyone at the News of the World (NOTW) could have authorised it.
She said at the time of Milly's disappearance she believed that the press had acted with "huge caution" and done its best to respect the family's privacy.
Explaining the moment she heard of the claims about Milly's phone, she said: "My instant reaction, like everybody else, was one of shock and disgust."

Milly Dowler's phone was allegedly hacked by the NOTW
Mrs Brooks said for "a family who had suffered so much already, these allegations clearly added immeasurably to their suffering".
"The first thing I did was write to Mr and Mrs Dowler with a full apology to say that we would get to the bottom of the allegations."
She added: "The idea that Milly Dowler's phone was accessed by someone being paid by the News of the World, or even worse authorised by someone at the News of the World, is as abhorrent to me as it is to everyone in this room.
"And it is an ultimate regret that the speed in which we have tried to find out the bottom of these investigations has been too slow."
Police have said there could be almost 4,000 hacking victims.
Mrs Brooks is one of a number of people arrested by officers investigating the claims. She was later released on bail.
Among those who may have had their phone hacked are families of those who died in the 7/7 bombings.
Mrs Brooks said allegations that the NOTW illegally accessed the voicemails of victims of crime were "horrific".

Rebekah Brooks, the schmoozer hated by Murdoch's wife and daughter

Who would have imagined when Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland in 1865 that the Cheshire village of Daresbury where he lived would one day produce its own real-life Alice?

Her name was Rebekah Wade (now Brooks) and her tugboat-man father could have had no idea when his only child was born in 1968 that she would step — or rather schmooze — into a world of princes, prime ministers and proprietors, every bit as hazardous as Alice’s.

This was the media wonderland run by Rupert Murdoch, and until yesterday he made sure that no harm would come to the girl he has virtually treated as another daughter (he has four real daughters, from three marriages).


No love lost: Elisabeth Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks are not close friends and Ms Murdoch has even suggested in the wake of the scandal that she has f***** the company

Asked for his priority when arriving in Britain on the day he shut the News of the World to handle the phone hacking and police-bribing scandals, he gestured at the smiling, ever-attendant Rebekah standing next to him and replied: ‘This one.’ So the grief and frustration felt by the 80-year-old mogul would have been immense yesterday as his cherished Rebekah bowed to the inevitable and resigned from her role as News International’s chief executive.

How different things might have been had she stepped down at the start of the crisis. It might have stopped the News of the World closing and hundreds working there from losing their jobs.

 

Murdoch admits I've let my father down as he makes emotional apology to Milly's family
Yet Murdoch’s feelings of loss won’t be shared by the women in his family. Daughter Elisabeth, a year younger than Rebekah Brooks and almost as tough, is understood to have fulminated at her handling of the scandal, telling friends that Mrs Brooks had ‘f*****’ the company. And last month when Murdoch’s young and glamorous third wife Wendi failed to turn up at his summer party at London’s Kensington Gardens, friends murmured darkly that it was ‘because Rebekah will be there’.

But then observers believe Rebekah Brooks’s remarkably swift rise in the company was due not so much to her talents as a journalist but to her single-minded ruthlessness and her dazzling, feline ability to charm. ‘Rebekah schmoozes in one direction only — up,’ says one of her oldest acquaintances. ‘I don’t know anyone who is better at love-bombing, when it matters. I wouldn’t think Rupert stood a chance.’


Father figure: Rebekah Brooks and Rupert Murdoch have a very close relationship, leading to even Murdoch's wife Wendi avoiding functions that she attends

She and Murdoch went for swims together, they sailed together. When a surprised colleague asked: ‘Who sails?’ she replied simply: ‘The Murdochs.’ She talked to Murdoch every day. When he walked into a room at a business or social gathering, she was at his side.

‘It’s always been obvious that he feels like a father figure to her,’ says one of his circle. At social functions she was his ‘part nurse, part protector,’ says one of the circle. ‘On one occasion, I even heard her asking him: “Have you taken your pills, Rupert?”’

‘She watches over him and makes sure he is comfortable with whoever he’s talking to; making sure his glass is filled. Rupert’s not young any more, and it was clear that the older he got the more he relied on her. She made herself indispensable.’

But then, being indispensable was her speciality — during her years as editor of the News of the World and The Sun, she made herself indispensable to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, in turn. She went to their parties and they certainly made sure they went to hers.

No one could say that Rebekah Brooks did not live up to a reputation which, frankly, scared even powerful men — not to mention the staff who remember her, as an editor, demanding they do ‘whatever it takes’ to bring in exclusive stories.

 

Rebekah Brooks: ‘Many people were quite scared of her.’

In 1997, when she was a 29-year-old feature writer on the News of the World, Rebekah Wade made a trip to Westminster to intercept the Conservative MP Jerry Hayes. The paper was planning to run an exposé of the married MP's affair with his 18-year-old lover, she told him – or as the headline would put it that Sunday: "TORY MP 2-TIMED WIFE WITH UNDER-AGE GAY LOVER".

Hayes was devastated, but found himself so charmed by the young redhead and the sympathetic manner in which she had delivered the news that he later phoned the News of the World to thank them for the way they had handled the story.

Three years later, Wade was the paper's editor. Less than a decade after that she was chief executive of Britain's most powerful newspaper group – a meteoric ascent attributed by close observers to this exceptional, potent cocktail of clear-eyed ruthlessness and dazzling charm.

It is a talent that even those who know or have worked for Rebekah Brooks – as she now is – describe in awed tones. "Andy Coulson often joked that the essence of tabloid journalism is turning someone over one day, and them ringing to thank you the next," recalls one ex-Sun staffer, who worked under both editors. "Rebekah Brooks is the ultimate exponent of that art."

On the evening of November 2, 2005, the day that David Blunkett had been forced to resign from government for the second time in a year, the former minister travelled to the Sun's offices in Wapping to share a drink with the paper's editor. The Sun, the previous year, had been the paper that named Kimberley Quinn, the Spectator's publisher, as Blunkett's lover.

But if such a talent can explain Brooks's meteoric rise, it does not explain the extraordinary tenacity with which she has clung to her job as News International chief – even while James Murdoch was forced to acknowledge "repeated wrongdoing" at the News of the World, admitted NI executives had misled parliament and abolished the biggest selling newspaper in the country. Can it really be the case, as Friday's Independent put it, that the News of the World has been "sacrificed to save one woman"? And if so, why?

The key to understanding Brooks, say those who know or have worked with her, is her breathtaking networking abilities. She is, says one, a "galaxy-class schmoozer. World-class doesn't quite do it justice." Certainly the briefest glance at her social circle reveals a network of establishment connections that few, if any, could match.

To describe her as a friend of David Cameron would be to underestimate their intimacy, say friends. Brooks and her second husband Charlie, a racehorse trainer and old Etonian, live very close to the Camerons in Oxfordshire. They met for dinner at least once over Christmas, and frequently see each other at weekends with what has been termed the "Chipping Norton set" – among them the PR man Matthew Freud and his partner, Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, and Jeremy Clarkson. Brooks has even commented that unlike Murdoch senior she has no need to go to Downing Street for audiences with Cameron, since she sees him so frequently socially.

It is easy to forget that she was just as intimate with Cameron's predecessor, and the man at No 10 before that. Brooks, then Wade, was seen by many as half of a Labour power-couple, thanks to her then husband Ross Kemp's vocal support of the party and their close relationship with the Blairs. So intimate a friend did Cherie Blair consider her, in fact, that she reproached the then editor for attending a party at 11 Downing St, seat of the hated Browns. That cooled as her friendship with the Browns grew closer – Brooks attended a "sleepover" of female friends of Sarah Brown's at Chequers in 2008. Guy (now Lord) Black, ex-director of the Press Complaints Commission, and his partner, Mark Bolland, once Prince Charles's aide, were once holiday companions.

But Brooks's friendships are not only strategic, say intimates, who speak of her tremendously warm, conspiratorial, almost flirtatious manner. A number of former Labour ministers are still good friends, while she has maintained close relationships with, among others, Sarah Payne's family and Sheryl Gascoigne. Max Clifford, one of few willing to speak openly about her, said she was loyal, generous and "very genuine". "I have always found her to be a straight-up person. That is very, very rare in journalism."

Rebekah Wade was born in Daresbury, Cheshire in 1968 and attended Appleton Hall County Grammar school in Warrington. By 14, she had decided she wanted to be a journalist. She worked briefly for an architecture magazine in Paris, and her Who's Who entry states that she studied at the Sorbonne; in fact she took only a short course.

While still a teenager she joined Eddie Shah's short-lived tabloid daily the Post as features secretary. The Private Eye journalist Tim Minogue was one of her editors, and recalls a likeable, "skinny, hollow-eyed" girl who was "very, very, very ambitious".

On one occasion, Minogue recalls, the paper had run a promotion offering bottles of supposedly aphrodisiac lager from a brewery in Strasbourg, which for some reason had been held up.

"So Rebekah volunteered to drive to Strasbourg, a 20-year-old in a clapped out Renault 5 or something, load up her car and drive back. At the time we thought that was quite a funny story, but in retrospect it's quite telling about what she was prepared to do to get on."

After the Post closed Brooks joined the News of the World's magazine, where she caught the eye of the then editor, Piers Morgan, who promoted her so rapidly that very little of her career, according to those who worked with her, was spent in on-the-ground journalism. At just 29 she was made deputy editor of the Sun, and it is a mark of her tremendous confidence, some would say overweening chutzpah, that she was disappointed to be passed over the following year for the editor's job in favour of David Yelland. In 2000 Murdoch gave her the consolation prize of editing the News of the World.

Her stint there saw the paper expose Angus Deayton and Prince Harry's drugtaking, and Sophie Rhys-Jones for trading on her royal connections. But she will chiefly be remembered for the "Sarah's law" campaign, in which the paper began naming and shaming sex offenders until forced to stop after it provoked attacks on innocent people.

In 2003 she finally got the job she had coveted as editor of the Sun. Her first act, frustrating the hopes of her Labour friends, marked clearly that her loyalty was first to the Sun's legacy and her employers: Page 3 ran as usual was to run Page 3, featuring a model called "Rebekah, 22, from Wapping".

She had some notable successes, earning praise for reinjecting wit after Yelland's drier tenure, and scored a sensational scoop securing an advance copy of the Hutton report into David Kelly's death. But some of the attempts at populist humour were tone deaf. A splash about the boxer Frank Bruno being sectioned ("Bonkers Bruno Locked Up") provoked outrage, as did "Ship Ship Hooray!" after Harold Shipman's suicide.

A bizarre episode in which she spent a night in the cells after being arrested for attacking Kemp was treated with good humour, however. The editor came straight to the office from the cells, said: "Much happening today?", and promptly splashed on the story.

Her employees recall a woman who was respected and feared more than she was liked. "There was a lot of shouting, a lot more stress, when Rebekah was editor," comments one Sun staffer. "I think many people were quite scared of her." Some News of the World staff have tartly denied reports that Brooks was in tears as she delivered the news of their sacking on Thursday.

In September 2009 Brooks was elevated to chief executive by Rupert Murdoch. And it is this relationship, however powerful and intimate her other friends, that is the key to her story.

Murdoch has four daughters but regards Brooks as another, say observers, and perhaps the closest of the lot. The pair had a habit of going for swims together, and he has hosted birthday parties for her. For her 40th it is said he bought her a Lowry. When she was arrested for attacking Kemp, he sent a designer suit to the police station so she would look her best when she left. One story has Murdoch, told that the Sun had been scooped by an impressive Mirror story, phoning the former NI chairman Les Hinton to ask: "Is she all right?"

That concern has certainly been evident this week. News International staff may increasingly want her to stand down, parliament, the leader of the opposition and even her friend the PM may consider her position untenable. But Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch believe Brooks's standard of ethics is "very good". And so, for the time being at least, she's going nowhere.