From quite early in the hacking trial, it was clear that the prosecution evidence against Rebekah Brooks was pretty thin.
There was precious little proof that the former News International chief executive knew anything about phone hacking by her staff when she was editor of the News of the World or afterwards.
Similarly, the prosecution’s case that she had been involved in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice was anything but convincing. It was no wonder that she, her husband Charlie and the others who were accused of that conspiracy were cleared unanimously by the jury.
As the verdicts were announced, I recalled the day in May 2012 when she was officially charged. Her denial was not merely strenuous. Her public statement was withering in its contempt for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
She called the case against her “an expensive sideshow” and “a waste of public money”. Charlie thought his wife “the subject of a witch-hunt”.
Brooks will surely seek to rebuild a reputation that has been badly damaged ever since the hacking scandal first broke in July 2011 and, under considerable public pressure, she resigned from Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group.
At the time, he defended her, and he has always been convinced of her innocence. It is not without possibility that they will work together again.
Rebekah Brooks - a career in pictures
It is blindingly obvious that Brooks feels vindicated by the jury’s decision. She was furious about being charged and has suppressed her sense of outrage throughout the nine-month trial.
In many ways, it is possible to see the outcome of the case as yet another example of Brooks’s capability to surprise the naysayers who could never come to terms with the meteoric media rise of a woman — and a young one at that.
Having joined the News of the World in 1989 as a secretary, she was soon writing features for its magazine. When I first met her in 1991, she was introduced to me by a mutual friend as the paper’s “next editor”. I remember her smiling at the compliment, which seemed far-fetched at the time.
It was a sign of one characteristic that marked her out as different from other ambitious colleagues — self-belief.
There were others, not least her ability to engage with anyone who was useful to her, whether it was a senior executive, the source for a story or, later, Britain’s most senior politicians.
She is routinely described as a supreme networker, and what critics fail to grasp is that her engaging charm is a facet of her personality rather than a calculating act. She is, to use the cliché, a people person.
This particular quality was absent from almost every other tabloid editor before her. They liked to make their papers in the office. Brooks, by contrast, enjoyed creating her papers through face-to-face contact with those who, one way or another, were the subjects of articles.
Murdoch, usually immune to the blandishments of editors and executives who sought to befriend him, fell under Brooks’s spell. He appointed her as News of the World editor in 2000 when she was just 32.
Less than three years later, he gave her the editorship of the Sun. Six years on from that, she moved up to become his UK publishing chief executive.
It was a remarkable rise, and I would now expect her to surprise us all over again.
Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London, and writes a blog for the Guardian
