Rebekah Brooks 79


brooks

Spot the Cuckold Competition

A jury has been unable to find that, beyond a reasonable doubt. Rebekah Brooks was a party to the industrial scale phone hacking that was going on all around her. A 5 million pound legal team did its job. Such things happen.

But take a considered view of what that means. While she was Editor, and while she was Chief Executive, numerous people who reported directly to her were engaged in an active criminal conspiracy, the results of which she was seeing almost every single day, and to which hundreds of thousands of pounds of company money were diverted without her noticing. The leader of the criminal conspiracy, Coulson, not only reported directly to her, but she was shagging him too. She still noticed nothing.

If we accept that as true – and the jury did – it makes her one of the most incompetent managers and company executives in corporate history. Her negligence and complete lack of grip, over years, on what those immediately beneath her were doing, wiped off billions in shareholder value and lost a major commercial asset in the News of the World title. It also tarnished the company’s image irredeemably. On top of which she was given to shagging people for whom she had line management responsibility – if she were a man the feminists would be screaming from the rooftops about that.

In a rational world she would never be employed in any position of responsibility again. If Murdoch really did not know about the phone hacking, if he were genuinely disgraced and sorry, he would be furious at her for her gross negligence. Instead he has given her 10.8 million pounds.

Outwith the gilded circle of the stinking rich Brooks would never work again, having destroyed the News of the World and the image of News International. But the gilded circle will close around her.

The ultra-rich are not like you or me. They are treated by totally different standards. They also behave differently. They have no problem with being cuckolded. Charlie Brooks sent his best wishes to Coulson in jail. If I were Brooks, I would be sending money in to pay very large men to help him find the soap in the shower. Although presumably like Aitken and Archer, Coulson is going to one of those jails for posh people where you can play golf and go home at the weekend. I never understood Brigadier Parker Bowles either, though apparently his wife’s shagging was good for his military career. Funny people, toffs.

Being a right slapper seems not to have harmed Brooks’ career (feminists please note, I here apply the term slapper purely in the technical sense that she gave Ross Kemp a good slapping). That particular asset of hers has faded fast. But I think we can be quite certain that her future will be very different from that of anyone outside the top 1% of earners who had totally failed in their employment. It rather removes the argument that the disgusting wealth gap in the country relates to achievement and risk.


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79 thoughts on “Rebekah Brooks

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  • Ba'al Zevul (Chimp Assassin)

    How does Cherie put up with it all?

    Looking at Tony’s travel record, she has plenty of time to make her own arrangements, and several nice houses to make them in. I doubt she’s complaining.

  • Abe Rene

    “The ultra-rich are not like you or me. They are treated by totally different standards.” Lucky so-and-sos 🙂

    Actually I think it better to be grateful and content at what wealth we have, e.g. at *not* being North Koreans, Palestinians, Rohingya, or (if this applies) free from any number of other sufferings of life.

    And I haven’t begun to mention the positives..

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    When juries acquit someone the Eminences and Useful Idiots disapprove of, that’s bad.

    When juries find guilty someone the Eminences and Useful Idiots disapprove of, that’s good.

    Funny, that.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    “How does Cherie put up with it all?

    Looking at Tony’s travel record, she has plenty of time to make her own arrangements, and several nice houses to make them in. I doubt she’s complaining.”
    ______________________

    Do you have it off occasionally, Ba’al, or have you sacrificed it on the altar of your blogging?

  • Geoffrey

    Interesting how the affair was discovered-from a never sent draft email,I am surprised this could be used in evidence,and that it was quoted from in all newspapers and tv.
    Surely draft emails cant be used as evidence?
    What next? …. Thought police I suppose.

  • N_

    The jury didn’t accept it as true that she knew nothing and wasn’t involved. They just accepted it as a possibility which might be true. On that basis, they had to acquit. The defence didn’t have to prove anything. Personally I expected no convictions at all.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    N_

    “The jury didn’t accept it as true that she knew nothing and wasn’t involved. They just accepted it as a possibility which might be true. On that basis, they had to acquit”
    _____________________

    Do you have a special telepathic channel into the jury’s mind or is the above just guesswork, N_ ?

    If the latter, you might advance your idea in slightly more modest fashion?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    “Tim Ireland produced this blog for Craig AFAIK.”
    ________________

    Mary creeping again.

    Throw her a bone, someone.

  • Mary

    Why is a PR firm (a very expensive one by all accounts) needed when a celebrity is on trial?

    ‘Bell Pottinger, the PR firm hired to represent Harris during his trial, could not confirm whether the 84-year-old had the painting in his possession.’

    Who, what, why: What happened to Rolf Harris’s portrait of the Queen?
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28105318

    Bell Pottinger lobby for Bahrain too. Nice.

    Tory fundraising party: Bahrain lobbyist sat with defence secretary
    Almost 20 lobbyists and PR specialists attended 2013 summer party, including Earl of Clanwilliam who represents Bahrain government
    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/01/tory-fundraising-party-bahrain-defence-secretary

    What a rotten lot we have in power over our lives.

  • mickcm

    With respect, we do not know if the jury believed her.

    We do know that they considered the charges were not proven beyond reasonable doubt.

    The two things are entirely different; after all both sides may have been disbelieved.

  • DavidH

    Geoffrey 5:27 pm – “Surely draft emails cant be used as evidence? What next? …. Thought police I suppose.”

    Computer Forensics these days. Certainly draft emails can be extracted from your computer, often even after they’ve been deleted. Much else besides. With proof of exactly when they were created. And not only computers but phones and other mobile devices as well. This stuff gives pretty conclusive evidence of what somebody was thinking and doing over a period of time. Definitely thought police. There are moves to provide this technology to police stations so that everybody who gets arrested then has the data extracted from any mobile device they are carrying. Arrested, that is, not necessarily convicted of anything. So police can search your phone records for known criminal matches, your cell site records for movement correlations with known criminals, your emails and draft emails for red-flag words and phrases, your internet search history for suspicious interests. You don’t have to be afraid if you’re not doing anything wrong, right?

  • Bena

    Excellent – not an editorial that you would see in one of Britain’s newspapers.

  • Geoffrey

    Thanks DavidH,for the explanation.
    I am still surprised that every newspaper,tv channel lovingly repeated the private unsent,deleted emails of Rebecca Brooks and this appears to have been the prosecutions main evidence?
    I could just about understand it if the police,having seen the draft,asked her if there was any truth to it,but to then publicise it seems worrying.

  • Jon

    I quite agree that it is eyebrow-raising to think that Brooks knew nothing. I haven’t followed the case in detail, but perhaps there will be analysis of it that asks more justified and awkward questions. I share the general distaste here for the special set of rules that seem to apply to the allies of the powerful.

    But:

    If I were Brooks, I would be sending money in to pay very large men to help him find the soap in the shower.

    No, no, no – there is no category of offence for which jokes about prison rape are necessary. This contributes to the a culture where male-on-male rape is seen as cartoonish and as a payback (on top of the prison sentence) for the seriousness of an inmate’s crimes as we perceive them. There is a campaign group in the U.S. that specifically works to reduce such sexual violence in prisons there, where I understand it is a particular problem.

    Yes, many of the establishment have dirtied our politics and cheapened our democracy. They’ve flogged our hospitals and our media and our systems of government. Most of this has been done in a process so far removed from fair it is hard to know what to call corrupt any more. But, where we find wrong-doing, let’s apply liberal principles that rely entirely on the law, even if that system is flawed, and let’s reject all inhumane devices of extrajudicial punishment.

  • jim bubb

    The prosecuting counsel in the Brooks trial, despite poverty, drastic lack of resources compared to Laidlaw, circumstantial evidence etc. still had a lot of ammunition. He must have been remarkably inept in his presentation of it to the jury.

  • Joan the Bone

    A 5 million pound legal team did its job. Such things happen.”

    Ask David Irving about that. His “crime” was to repudiate, via decades of research, the claim that Adolph Hitler ordered the extermination of Jews. I suspect the judge, in his Lipstadt trial, was influenced by Mr Cook’s performance here.

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