Abstract
Rebekah Brooks: “Occasionally he would sign them [text messages from David Cameron] off ‘LOL’, ‘Lots of love’, actually until I told him it meant ‘Laugh out loud’, then he didn't sign them like that anymore.”
Robert Jay QC: “It [Elisabeth Murdoch's birthday party, attended by Rebekah and Charles Brooks] actually was held at somewhere called Burford Priory. I don't know where that is, although I detect it might be in Oxfordshire.”
RB: “It's in Burford.”
Lord Justice Leveson: “Well done.”
RB: “Well, Mr Jay, today you've put to me quite a few, shall we say, gossipy items, for want of a better word…”
RJ: “Same sort of stuff one reads or did read in the News of the World…“
RB: “And The Sun.”
RJ: “…and continues to read in The Sun. Isn't that true?”
RB: “Yes, but we're not in a tabloid newsroom now, are we?… We're in an inquiry. So you put a personal few things. did Rupert Murdoch and I swim? Where did I get the horse from? Did Mr Murdoch buy me a suit? The list is endless and I've had to refute a lot of those allegations because… they're wrong. I do feel that that… a lot of it is gender-based. I think… if I was a grumpy old man of Fleet Street, no one would write the first thing about it…”
—All from evidence given by former News International chief executive officer Rebekah Brooks to the Leveson Inquiry, May 11
‘He has the same influence as any other major shareholder. You know, we will talk to News Corporation just as we talk to any other of our share holders. and, you know, what do we do? We want them to understand the strategy, we want them to buy into that, we want them to support the direction of the company, and he does so.’
— Jeremy Darroch, chief executive officer of BSkyB, when asked by Steve Hewlett how significant an influence Rupert Murdoch is on the business, The Media Show, Radio 4, May 9