Rebekah….going for sympathy vote?
…and Newscorp invites Hunt to its Summer Party
It’s pretty clear that, during 2005, Newscorp CEO Rebekah Brooks’s mobile phone must’ve been the most public piece of personal technology on the planet. For as well as her conversations being bugged by the Met Police (they probably wanted to know what was on the menu for dinner that night) A N Other Newscorp title was also hacking her message-box. What a good job it is, then, that Rebekah wasn’t hacking anyone herself; otherwise her phone would’ve had a nervous breakdown at some point.
But it does make you wonder about all that shareholders’ money going on detectives’ fees when it might have been a whole lot easier to just….you know, have a meeting or something.
Call me suspicious, but I sense a dimension of sympathy vote in this ‘she-was-hacked-too’ mullarkey. Fine, I know the Met found her name in all the Mulcaire stuff, but…well, this is the Met we’re talking about here. And Roop – who has a bit of a thing for Big Hair Becky – is very keen for her to get off.
I mean here you are, the editor of the Screws, and you know that the Sun’s editor is the apple of the boss’s eye. What better way to further your career than hack her phone, and then run a story about – and I choose this entirely at random – her actor beau being in bed with somebody else very young when you get back home after a party? Put it like this: it isn’t the strategy I’d adopt.
Oh – I nearly forgot – the revelation that Ms Brooks was a likely repeated target for Mr Mulcaire was made by…..Sky News. What a relief that it’s being spun off as part of the BSkyB bid scam sorry, approval process.
Ms Brooks or Mr Coulson or son James (or any one of a dozen people, really) being found in Mr Mulcaire’s haul having done some hacking wouldn’t be good for Murdoch’s BSkyB bid approval; and yet what the Met finds is somebody hacking the editor’s phone. It’s a rum old world.
Still, the multinational Rupert remains as keen as mustard to have his prize, and thus didn’t think twice about inviting Jeremy Hunt to the Newscorp summer bash. The uncaring brass neck of it is amazing, is it not? But even Basil Brush had enough sensitivity to turn that one down.
Anyway, Mr Hunt is far too busy deciding whether to give Newscorp the bid go-ahead. So he must now retire, in order to consider his decision, of ‘Yes’.
The Slog 