The Vindictiveness Of Rebekah Brooks

As usual, when the Murdoch Mafiosi paid off yet more claims of phone hacking and other less than totally legal information gathering at the High Court earlier this week, most of our free and fearless press chose to keep schtum, rather than upset their readers with the sordid details. So once again, the line was maintained that only the late and not at all lamented Screws hacked, while the Super Soaraway Currant Bun did not.

Dumping on the little people ...

But not all those involved agreed to go along with the charade, notably actor Sienna Miller, despite, as the BBC reported, “Lawyers for News Group Newspapers (NGN), the Sun's parent company, had argued in court that Ms Miller should not be able to say anything in open court about the newspaper because she had settled without going to trial”.

There was more: “the High Court judge ruled that she could publicly repeat some of her suspicions, based on evidence in her case, even if they were unproven”. And, as the Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson noted, those suspicions were not unfounded. “The actor said the then Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, now the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK business, phoned her agent in 2005 to discuss [her] pregnancy before the actor had had the opportunity to discuss it with close friends and family”.

... this week it's Sienna Miller ...

And Ms Brooks knew of the pregnancy how, exactly? “[Ms Miller] believes a Sun reporter illegally obtained her private medical information from a ‘blagger' … [she] made a series of claims about the behaviour of Nick Parker, who remains a senior Sun journalist, based on documents obtained during the legal discovery process”. Do go on.

“Miller believes her private medical records were obtained by Parker through a blagger named Christine Hart, who issued an invoice to Parker for ‘Sienns [sic] Miller Pregnant research’. Parker’s personal expenses also used references such as ‘SIENNA MILLER PREGNANCY RIDDLE’ and ‘DINNER WITH TRACER (WHO CONFIRMED SIENNA WAS PREGNANT)’”. She also believed that friends and family had their phones hacked.

... in the past it was Chris Bryant ...

And this brings us to the truly vindictive nature of Rebekah Brooks: as Ms Miller has told, “It is a part of my case that [Brooks] assured those that represent me that she would not print that information. And it is part of my case that she, the Sun, did print that information”. The information about her pregnancy. When push comes to shove, the inclination of Ms Brooks and her fellow Mafiosi is to shit all over the little people.

Like Labour MP Chris Bryant, whose questioning of her before the DCMS Committee led to the admission that she had paid Police officers for information, which is illegal. Not long after that, Bryant was brutally outed. He later recalled her approaching him: “She came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Mr Bryant, it’s after dark – shouldn’t you be on Clapham Common?’”

... and John Alford

Like John Alford, who was entrapped by the now-disgraced “fake sheikh” Mazher Mahmood in one of the latter’s drug stings, and as a result had his career destroyed. He has now revealed that he had been in a bar late one night, he’d had a few scoops, and he made a disobliging comment about Ms Brooks that, it seems, got back to her.

The vindictive and poisonous are entitled to their embittered and downright nasty modus operandi. The problem comes when they wield the kind of power granted them by high office in what former Labour MP Tom Watson rightly called a Mafia Organisation.

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