Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor, said this week that Prime Minister David Cameron talked with her after she left her job in the wake of the scandal that erupted. Brooks resigned in July as the chief executive of News International, the British newspaper run by Rupert Murdoch. When Brooks stepped down from her position, she said she received calls of support from former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Cameron.
Brookes noted that Cameron is a personal friend of hers as well as a neighbor in Cotswolds. Brooks also said that she gave Cameron advice on how to text message people. Brooks admitted that she received ‘indirect messages’ supporting her from aides of politicians. Some of these messages came from Cameron.
“I received some indirect messages from No. 10, No. 11, the Home Office and Foreign Office,” Brooks said. She was referring to Treasury chief George Osborne, Cameron and other members from the cabinet. Lawyer Robert Jay asked Brooks is the message Cameron received was ‘keep your head up’ and if Cameron expressed regret that he could not offer more loyalty because of the pressure he was under from the scandal.
Brooks said that the message was “along those lines, I don’t think they were the exact words.”
Brooks told the lawyer that Cameron and her would exchange text messages once or twice per week.
“He would sign them off ‘DC’ in the main,” said Brooks. “Occasionally he would sign them off LOL, ‘lots of love’, until I told him it meant ‘laugh out loud’.” Brooks also said she talked with Cameron about phone hacking by the tabloids and said but “not very often, once or twice … it kept coming up, so we would bring it up.”
Brooks also discussed close to 20 formal meetings she had with Cameron from 2005 to 2011. Blair sent a message of support to Brooks when she resigned as well. Brooks said in a statement to the inquiry, “Tony Blair, his senior Cabinet, advisers and press secretaries were a constant presence in my life for many year. I became close friends with his wife Cherie Blair … and also with the Blairs’ closest advisers, including Alistair Campbell and his partner Fiona Miller.”
Brooks, when serving as the editor of The Sun Tabloid, she offered support of the role Britain played in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
“During the Iraq war, I spent more time than usual talking to Tony Blair and Downing Street,” she said. Brooks said that there were at least 12 dinners and drinks meetings with Blair from 2005 to 2007 and also said that Blair was one of the major political players who went to her 40th birthday party at Murdoch’s home.