Rebekah Brooks was upset by Milly Dowler voicemail hacking, say PAs
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Version 0 of 1. Rebekah Brooks was particularly upset by the disclosure that the News of the World had hacked the voicemail of the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and tasked her two personal assistants to check old diaries and bank records to see whether she had been in the country when it happened, an Old Bailey jury heard on Wednesday. Giving evidence in the phone-hacking trial, one of the PAs, Deborah Keegan, described how she and her colleague, Cheryl Carter, would look after every detail of Brooks's personal life from ensuring she had a fresh bottle of water on her desk in the morning to booking her personal trainers in London and Oxford. "It was life management," she said. The jury heard of emailed requests from Brooks to buy more moisturiser and face powder, to send a driver to pick up keys she had left in her flat, to obtain the original of a cartoon from the Times, and to book a table for her and Rupert Murdoch to have dinner at the Kingham Plough pub in Chipping Norton. Mrs Keegan had also emailed Brooks's mother at one point to reassure her that 'Becky' was well. "It was a tough atmosphere to work in because Rebekah was very demanding but we had a good working relationship." Keegan recalled the mood in Brooks's office in July 2011 after the Dowler hacking was revealed: "She was particularly upset," she said. "Rightly so." Brooks had asked the two PAs to check whether she had been in the country at the time. "If Rebekah asked for something, she would get it," she said. Brooks had not told them that the News of the World was to be closed that week: "We heard the same as everyone else, but there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in and out of Rebekah's office. We were aware of something." The jury heard that on a typical day, one of the PAs would be in the office by 7am to open the post and make sure that Brooks's desk was ready with a bottle of water and a clean sheet of paper for her note-taking. As soon as Brooks arrived, the canteen would be told to bring up her breakfast. Several days a week, she would work out with her personal trainer, Zack, in the basement gym. When she was at home, she had a different trainer, Calum, and the PAs had arranged a joint bootcamp for Brooks and her husband, Charlie. Keegan said her work as a PA would include booking Brooks's holidays, doing her shopping, organising cleaners at her home, looking after her cars, helping with her security, dealing with her family and supervising banking for her and Charlie. She and Carter had access to Brooks's bank account, complete with her PIN, and would go to the HSBC bank on Mondays to draw out £200 in cash for her. A "strictly private" box in the PAs' office contained a gun licence, a marriage certificate and share options while filing cabinets held Brooks's passport and driving licence, air mile records, Charlie Brooks's contracts, Cheltenham and Gloucester savings certificates, Barclays bank shares and records of investments in Morgan Stanley. Keegan told the jury that she remembered a decluttering Sunday in the late summer of 2009 when Brooks was about to take over as chief executive of News International. She and Carter had filled bin bags with unwanted paperwork and sent other material to the company archive to be stored. She said James Murdoch had wanted a paperless office. One of the items later sent for storage, the jury has heard, was a portrait of James Murdoch. Carter and Rebekah Brooks deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice by removing seven boxes containing Brooks's notebooks from the archive and destroying them. The trial continues. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |