Rebekah Brooks: where it all went wrong

In the end Rebekah Brooks' special relationship with Rupert Murdoch wasn't quite special enough to save her. Her status as the "fifth daughter" in the family was withdrawn as the support previously shown by Murdoch family members and key shareholders in the News Corporation empire turned to dust in just 24 hours.On Thursday, the 80-year-old media tycoon had come out all guns blazing, telling his Wall Street Journal that he would get over the crisis and insisting his company had handled the phone-hacking scandal extremely well.
But later that day the corporate death knell was sounded for Brooks after the second largest shareholder in News Corporation gave an extraordinary interview to BBC's Newsnight (interview starts 26 minutes in) from his yacht in Cannes: "For sure she has to go, you bet she has to go," declared Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Alsaud.
"Ethics to me are very important. I will not deal with a lady or a man that has any sliver of doubt on her or his integrity."
Worse, the friendship Brooks so carefully nurtured with Murdoch's second eldest daughter, Elisabeth, over the last 10 years appeared to have crumbled.
The Daily Telegraph reported that the 42-year-old TV executive had told friends that Brooks had "fucked the company".
And so, eight days after she announced the dramatic decision to close the News of the World, Brooks fell on her sword.
"I have given Rupert and James Murdoch my resignation ... this time my resignation has been accepted," she said in an email to staff just before 10am on Friday morning.
It was all so different last Thursday when Brooks told shocked News of the World staff that the paper was being shut down.
While they were losing their jobs, she was going to stay on despite the public revulsion over revelations days earlier that while she was editor of the paper murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked.
She said she need to stay at the helm to act as "lightning rod" for all the negativity raining down on the company, and explained to baffled and dispirited staff that in a year's time they would understand why she had stayed on.
Journalists within News International thought her decision to tough it out showed hubris in the extreme. "She was a timebomb strapped to Murdoch's leg," quipped one.
The tide began to turn on Brooks two weeks ago when the Guardian revealed that not only had messages been intercepted on Dowler's voicemail but they had been deleted to make way for new messages, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive.
Soon there were allegations that it had also snooped on 7/7 victims and Afghan soldiers' families and the question had become: Did the News of the World get any scoop without hacking into phones?
A scandal that had previously been confined to celebrities and politicians was now threatening to engulf the Murdochs' entire newspaper operation, with police confirming that there could be as many as 4,000 victims of the hacking.
The prime minister said he was "utterly appalled" by the Dowler revelations and said if Brooks had offered her resignation he would have accepted it.
It appeared that 30 years of resentment about the power Murdoch had exercised over a succession of prime ministers was coming together in a tsunami of political and commercial hostility against him.
By Wednesday 6 July the commercial future of News International was at stake, with advertisers announcing they would no longer take space in the News of the World.
Yet the Murdochs still stood firm behind Brooks, and after a series of transatlantic phone calls with his father, James announced the following day he was shutting the 168-year-old title down, a ruthlessly clever plan designed to draw a line under the affair.
In a series of interviews with TV stations, James Murdoch was unequivocal: "Fundamentally, I am satisfied that Rebekah, her leadership in this business and her standard of ethics and her standard of conduct throughout her career are very good."
Rupert Murdoch flew in to London on Sunday 10 July to take charge of the crisis that was by now threatening to scupper his takeover bid for BSkyB.
He made a point of dining out with James, Brooks and her husband Charlie in a Mayfair restaurant.
When asked what his top priority was he gestured to Brooks and said: "She is."
Their display of unity did not go down well with the Dowler family who the following day called on Brooks to do the honourable thing and resign.
News International's attempts to drive a wedge between the old News of the World regime and the new came further unstuck when an internal investigation revealed that the phone hacking was not confined to one "rogue reporter" as previously claimed by the company.
Sensational allegations of payments to police and allegations that the News of the World may even have hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims threatened to spread the contagion to the US where News Corp's real financial power lies.
By Wednesday 13 July Murdoch's bid for BSkyB was dead in the water and with it Brooks' future at the head of NI.
Lisa O'Carroll @'The Guardian'