Rebekah Brooks

Rebekah Mary Wade was born in 1968 in Warrington. She grew up in Daresbury, where her parents ran a tree pruning business.

When she was 14, she decided she wanted to be a journalist and would make tea at her local newspaper and help out generally. She attended Appleton Hall High School – a state comprehensive school that had previously been a grammar school – in Appleton, Warrington. A childhood friend, Louise Weir, described her as "more emotionally intelligent than academic", charming and always able to get what she wanted out of people.

In Brooks's entry in Who's Who, she stated that she had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, but did not claim to have a degree, and did not later answer questions about this. In a 2003 Spectator article, Stephen Glover suggested that, since she was working at the age of 20 for the News of the World, "we can safely assume that she did not study at the Sorbonne in any meaningful way". In 2010, Brooks was awarded an honorary Fellowship from the University of the Arts, London, for contributions to journalism. She briefly attended the London College of Communication, now part of the university, as a student but did not graduate.

The commentator Henry Porter claims little is known of Brooks personally. Tim Minogue, who was one of her first co-editors before becoming a journalist at Private Eye magazine, recalled a "likeable, skinny, hollow-eyed girl who was very ambitious".

After school, she worked for the French magazine L'architecture d'aujourd'hui in Paris, before returning to Britain to work for Eddy Shah's Messenger Group. Graham Ball, the then features editor at The Post newspaper, recalled that she was a notably astute and intelligent staff member. When The Post was disbanded, Brooks then moved to the News of the World.

News of the World

Brooks joined the Sunday newspaper News of the World in 1989 as a secretary, before working as a feature writer for its magazine, eventually becoming the paper's deputy editor. In 1994, she prepared for the News of the World's interview with James Hewitt, a lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, by reserving a hotel suite and hiring a team to "kit it out with secret tape devices in various flowerpots and cupboards", Piers Morgan, her former boss, wrote in his memoir The Insider, The New York Times relayed in July 2011. In 1998, she transferred to the News of the World's daily counterpart, The Sun, for a short time. She then returned to the News of the World in 2000 as editor; at the time, she was the youngest editor of a national British newspaper.

While at the News of the World, Brooks oversaw its campaign of "naming and shaming" individuals suspected to be convicted child sex offenders — a campaign launched in the wake of the murder of Sarah Payne, while hacking Payne's mother's voicemail. The paper's decision led to angry mobs terrorising those they suspected of being child sex offenders, which included several cases of mistaken identity and one instance where a paediatrician had her house vandalised, apparently by people who thought her occupation meant she was a paedophile.

The campaign was described as "grossly irresponsible" journalism by the Chief Constable of the Gloucestershire Police, Tony Butler, but Brooks defended the paper's actions on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost, claiming that it was "only right that the public have controlled access" to information on sex offenders. The paper's already strong sales held up well under her leadership, while those of rival Sunday newspapers The People and the Sunday Mirror fell more sharply.

Brooks became engaged to actor Ross Kemp in 1996, and married him in June 2002 in Las Vegas.

On 3 November 2005, it was reported that Brooks had been arrested following an alleged assault on her husband. She was released without charge, and the police took no further action. The Sun had been running a campaign against domestic violence at the time. The couple had spent the previous evening in the company of the former Cabinet Minister David Blunkett, who had resigned for the second time on that day. At her trial in 2013, it was revealed that Brooks and her married colleague, Andy Coulson had an affair that lasted from 1998 to 2007 during her marriage to Kemp.

Private Eye and The Independent reported the couple had separated; this was not widely reported in the remainder of the British press. The 7 March 2008 issue of Private Eye refers to her "paramour", former racehorse trainer and author Charlie Brooks. She and Kemp divorced in 2009. The Guardian reported on 5 June 2009 that she was to marry Brooks. The Independent reported Brooks and her fiancé had married in a lakeside ceremony in June 2009. The couple are key members of the so-called Chipping Norton set, which includes Jeremy Clarkson, David Cameron, and others. They live in Churchill, Oxfordshire, and London.

It was announced by Bell Pottinger that Rebekah and Charlie Brooks were expecting a daughter in early 2012 via a surrogate mother. A daughter was born at the private Portland Hospital in London on 25 January 2012.

The press have noted social ties between Brooks and various members of the Establishment. In 2008, she borrowed a retired police horse from the Metropolitan Police which she kept on her Oxfordshire farm, where it was ridden by David Cameron.

In December 2010, a dinner party was attended by Cameron and James Murdoch.

Brooks was once also a friend of Tony and Cherie Blair; and Gordon and Sarah Brown. Her wedding to Charlie Brooks in 2009 was attended by Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Shortly before her arrest in 2011, she had an hour-long telephone conversation with Tony Blair. He offered to act as an unofficial advisor to Brooks and to Rupert and James Murdoch. Blair told Brooks that this arrangement should remain private. He offered her advice on how to deal with the phone hacking scandal. Making reference to the Hutton Inquiry, which had cleared his government of wrongdoing related to the death of a biological warfare expert, Blair advised Brooks to set up an independent inquiry into the phone hacking scandal.

A police enquiry revealed that the News of the World had a routine practice of intercepting mobile phone messages of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. The newspaper's reporter, Clive Goodman, and Glenn Mulcaire, a hired investigator, were convicted and jailed for intercepting the phone messages of members of the Royal Family in 2006.

Questioning by MPs

In 2003, under questioning by Chris Bryant MP of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons, Brooks and Andy Coulson were asked whether either of their newspapers had ever been involved in various improper acts. Brooks replied "We have paid police for information in the past". Coulson added that payments were only made lawfully. The Sun, of which Brooks was editor, subsequently ridiculed Chris Bryant in a number of articles, starting with one about a photograph of him in his underpants from a gay dating website. Bryant has publicly alleged that his phone was hacked in 2003 by the News of the World. News International was ordered to pay Bryant £30,000 by a High Court judge in 2012 after Bryant filed a lawsuit. Brooks later claimed that in her response to Bryant's question she had merely been speaking about the widespread belief that payments had been made to police and denied having any knowledge of specific payments.

According to MPs, Brooks refused three times to attend the committee again to be questioned further, resulting in four committee members considering asking the Serjeant at Arms to issue a warrant forcing Brooks to attend. It was claimed by Adam Price, a Plaid Cymru MP, that the committee members subsequently dropped this proposal because they were warned by the chair of the committee, John Whittingdale, that their private lives would be investigated if they did so. However, this account is disputed by Whittingdale, who has stated there was a conversation about the possible repercussions of issuing a warrant for Brooks but said that did not have any bearing on his decision and he did not believe News International would target committee members.

On 11 May 2012, Brooks appeared as a witness in the Leveson Inquiry.