Phone-hacking trial: Brooks 'had nothing to do' with archiving notepads
|
Version 0 of 1. Rebekah Brooks had nothing to do with the archiving of seven boxes labelled as containing her notebooks that were allegedly concealed from police during the phone hacking investigation, a jury in the Old Bailey has heard. Her former secretary said Brooks only used notebooks "sporadically" when at the News of the World and that virtually everything in the boxes filed to the News International archive and now missing contained her personal belongings. Cheryl Carter, of Chelmsford Essex, said she did not discuss the archiving of the boxes with her boss nor did she seek her permission when doing so in 2009 as part of an office move. Carter denies one charge of conspiring with Brooks to conceal seven boxes of notepads days before the News of the World closed and said her boss did not use the type of notebooks that were packed away. Brooks would only occasionally use notebooks and when she did she would use "three or four pages" and then "discard" them, Carter told jurors. The boxes were moved to News International's archive in September 2009 when Carter and a secretarial colleague went to work on a Sunday afternoon to prepare for her boss's move following her promotion from editor of the Sun to chief executive of News International. Carter said the notebooks in the boxes contained her clippings of a beauty column she had in the Sun for six years along side notes from a beauty college course. She reconstructed the type of scrapbook she would have created of her cuttings, producing a pink A3 notebook similar to the one she used for the jurors to see. She said she would have placed five of these into each small archive box. Her Sun beauty column was weekly and lasted for six years, the jury heard. The jury heard that Carter wanted to keep her historic cuttings because they were of value to her for work and although she had 15 cupboards in the Sun editor's office, the space in Brooks's new office was going to be severely restricted because "they'd chopped Mr Rupert Murdoch's office in half and given us a small tiny space". The jury heard how Carter had developed her own cosmetics range and had asked management if she could open a beauty salon at News International. She had been given the go-ahead and bought equipment but this was put on hold because of budget cuts. Carter told jurors that all seven boxes were filled with her beauty scrapbooks apart from two notebooks belonging to Brooks. One was an A5 notebook Brooks had given her in 1995 when she first started working for her as a temp at the News of the World and the other was a telephone record book with the year 2007 written on the front . Asked by her defence counsel if Brooks played any part in the archiving of these notebooks, Carter replied: "No". Asked by Trevor Burke, QC, if Brooks was aware that Carter had gone into the office on the Sunday to pack up the office, she replied: "No". Did she ever discuss the boxes with Brooks? "No, she would have thought I was mad." The prosecution case, outlined in January, is that Carter requested the removal of the boxes on 8 July, two days before the News of the World closed, took the boxes home to conceal them for the police who were at the time investigating News of the World. The boxes were labelled as "Notebooks 1995 to 2007" with a second line stating they were "All notebooks from Rebekah Brooks, nee (Wade)". Carter said she accepted that she was responsible for the first part of the label but not the second. "I would never have described her as such [nee Wade]. "I would have put a Post It note on the top [of the boxes] just describing it," said Carter. Asked why she wasn't more explicit and stated that they were her notebooks, Carter said she didn't think she was entitled to archive anything as a secretary. Carter described herself as the "eyes and ears" of the newsroom in the News of the World and the Sun, both of which Brooks was editing before rising to the top position in the newspaper company. Giving evidence for the first day in the witness box Carter said she had never taken notes for Brooks at meetings or attended any of the newspaper conferences, the daily meetings where the news agenda of the day is discussed with senior staff. Although she studied shorthand, she had never used it in her 17 years working for Brooks. The jury heard she was also a friend of Ross Kemp, who she knew in sixth form at school, but had nothing to do with his later introduction to Brooks. She joined Brooks as a temp in 1995 and became her full-time secretary in 1996. Carter told jurors she never saw Brooks act as a "working journalist" and that she was always in a "managerial role". Asked what Brooks's management style was, Carter responded: "Fast, everything had to be done immediately." Her job, she told the jury, was to "make sure the office ran as smoothly as possible" and that Brooks's private life was also run as smoothly as possible. Carter has been charged with one count of conspiring to conceal potential evidence from police by removing permanently seven boxes of notebooks and other material from the archive of News International between 6 July 2011 and 9 July 2011. The jury heard on Tuesday that the boxes contained scrapbooks of cuttings of Carter's beauty column in the Sun even though they were labelled as Brooks's notebooks. Carter said the normal pad Brooks used both as deputy editor of the Sun and editor of the News of the World was an A3 desk pad. She would take the top sheet off and place it underneath and a backlog of these loose sheets would be removed and temporarily stored every three weeks. She was in the witness box for the first time on Tuesday after being invited to start her defence following the absence of Clive Goodman, the former royal editor of the News of the World who was midway through cross examination before he was taken ill. The jury heard that Goodman's evidence would be parked until a later date. |