LONDON — “The sun is shining.” So wrote Rebekah Brooks to staff on September 7 as she returned as CEO of News U.K. (formerly News International), a post she was forced to resign four years ago under threat of imminent arrest, leaving the corporate HQ in the company of security guards.
Brooks is back with a vengeance. Her best-selling paper, the Sun, led the next day with a splash on two British-born men killed in a drone attack on Syria — “Wham! Bam! Thank You Cam.”
Sources close to News U.K. say Rupert Murdoch flew in to London on the weekend after Brooks’ reinstatement to help pave the way for the return of his long-term protegé. Yet the first proof of Brooks’ rehabilitation in political circles will be if she is welcomed at top dinner tables at the Tory Party conference next month.
For someone who has dominated the court of public opinion for so long, this return must feel like a personal vindication. Brooks was acquitted after the most expensive trial in British legal history last year on all charges of conspiracy to phone-hacking, bribing public officials, and perverting the course of justice. Trial evidence revealed she felt she was part of a “sexist witch hunt” and a “proper Guardian, BBC, old Labour hit job” when the Guardian revealed that the News of the World hacked the mobile phone of a teenage murder victim Milly Dowler under her editorship.
Since then Brooks has not been short of money. She is reported to have received more than £16 million in a severance package, plus a chauffeur-driven car and central London office. It’s also been a colossally expensive corporate fightback for Murdoch (the costs of the hacking scandal were estimated at £238 million even before the trial began). In a normal media corporation, Brooks would be fired for reputational reasons, or at best shuffled off to some well-paid but obscure consultancy.
Murdoch’s News Corp is extraordinary. For 50 years he has enjoyed flying in the face of the establishment (while creating his own). Earlier this year the Sun withdrew its notorious Page Three topless model in the face of pressure from advertisers and campaigners, only to restore it again with a gleeful “gotcha.” (It has since been quietly shut down.) When Chris Bryant, until recently Labour’s shadow culture secretary and himself a phone-hacking victim, described Brooks’ reinstatement as “two fingers up to the British public,” he was only underlining the company’s provocative methods.
It’s probably not the mockery of outsiders News U.K. needs to worry about most. There is deep unhappiness about Brooks’ return in the Baby Shard, the company’s shiny new corporate HQ by London Bridge. This bubbled out last week in a video left on YouTube by Mark Hanna, the former head of group security at News International in which he threatened to go public with “shock” revelations and “confessions” from his eight-month sojourn in the dock with Brooks and the other defendants. And all the bravado and the threats obscure a much more important fact: Rebekah Brooks has not been cleared of all criminal charges.
