Prime Minister David Cameron sent a supportive text message to Rebekah Brooks days before she quit as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group, a new book claimed Wednesday. The claim, said to illustrate the closeness of the friendship between Cameron and a woman who was a key lieutenant of Murdoch, is made in an updated biography of the prime minister which was serialised in Murdoch’s The Times. Brooks is due to give long-awaited evidence on Friday to an inquiry into the ethics of the British press which was set up after the extent of phone hacking at Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World newspaper emerged. The tabloid was shut down in July last year following a public uproar after it was alleged it had hacked into the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a teenage girl who was later found murdered. The book said Cameron texted Brooks to urge her to keep her “head up” days before she resigned as chief executive of the News of the World’s owners News International in July 2011. The book, “Cameron: Practically A Conservative”, also says the prime minister and Brooks would often visit one another’s houses in the countryside of south Oxfordshire. But it said the contact ended suddenly after Brooks — who is married to Cameron’s long-time friend Charlie Brooks — quit her job in the wake of the closure of the News of the World. “The wider public might have liked to know too of the text message that Charlie Brooks told friends Cameron sent to Brooks at the beginning of the week in which she resigned, telling her to keep her head up and she’d get through her difficulties,” authors Francis Elliott, of The Times, and James Hannin, of the Independent on Sunday, say.
