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Rebekah Brooks, the tea girl who became queen of Rupert Murdoch's castle

Charming Murdoch ally Rebekah Brooks was fuelled by raging ambition. But after her acquittal in the UK phone-hacking trial, can she rise again?

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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Illustration: Craig Stephens
When Elisabeth Murdoch celebrated her 40th birthday in the summer of 2008, Rebekah Brooks produced a 32-page souvenir edition of tabloid newspaper The Sun for the guests at her party.

It contained joke stories, a spoof agony aunt column and a Page 3 picture with Elisabeth's head grafted on to the body of a naked woman and the headline "Lizzie's the breast".

Brooks had also secured personal messages from Tony Blair, the then British prime minister Gordon Brown and his eventual successor David Cameron.

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There were also messages from two serving cabinet ministers, John Reid and Tessa Jowell. All of them were effusive, if not sycophantic.

The paper carried the draft of the speech made by Elisabeth's husband, Matthew Freud, as the great and the good and the remarkably rich gathered in their 22-bedroom priory near Chipping Norton, 100km northwest of London. "This house," Freud said, "has played host to seven monarchs over the years, but perhaps it has not seen quite such an illustrious gathering as tonight."

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And there, in a single evening, you have Rebekah's world - the wealth, the power and, with the souvenir Sun, her own highimpact way of registering herself as an ally to the elite.

You also have some of the dark side of her newspapers.

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