Laugh out loud at ‘lots of love’

Mrs Brooks disclosed that the Prime Minister sent a message urging her to “keep your head up” when she resigned over the phone hacking scandal and expressed regret that he could not be more loyal.

The embarrassing revelations emerged as Mrs Brooks gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry.

Compounding Mr Cameron’s woes, she also disclosed an email suggesting that Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt colluded with News Corporation in a bid to prevent a public inquiry into phone hacking.

The email from News Corp public affairs executive Fred Michel said Mr Hunt wanted the firm to “guide his and Number 10’s thinking” on the scandal.

But a spokeswoman for Mr Hunt insisted that Mr Michel’s only contacts were with his special advisor, Adam Smith, who has already resigned.

Mrs Brooks detailed her contacts, for more than a decade, with the most powerful people in the country, including dozens of lunches and dinners with successive prime ministers.

She met or dined with Tony Blair at least 30 times between 1998 and 2007, including three times on their own.

There was a minimum of five encounters with Gordon Brown after he entered Number 10, although she said she was closer to his “amazing”

wife Sarah. But the links with Mr Cameron, whom she described as a “friend”, are likely to provoke the most fallout.

They met at least once for lunch and four times for dinner following the 2010 General Election, including a now notorious Christmas dinner party at the Brooks’ Oxfordshire home on December 23.

Mrs Brooks said that after she left News International last July, she received commiserations from “some Tories”

but “very few Labour politicians”.

“I received some indirect messages from Number 10, Number 11, the Home Office, the Foreign Office,” she said.

Mrs Brooks indicated that Mr Cameron’s message had been “along the lines” of “keep your head up”.

Asked to confirm that he also conveyed regret that political circumstances meant he could not be more “loyal”, Ms Brooks replied: “Similar, but very indirect.”

Mrs Brooks, 43, dismissed reports that Mr Cameron would text her 12 times a day.

“It is preposterous,” she said. “I would hope the Opposition leader or Prime Minister had better things to do and I hope that as chief executive I did.

“I would text Mr Cameron, and vice-versa, on occasion, like a lot of people. Probably more between January 2010 and maybe during the election campaign.

“He would sign them off DC, in the main. Occasionally he would sign them off lol, lots of love. Until I told him it meant laugh out loud.”

Mrs Brooks pointed out that her husband, Charlie, a contemporary of the Prime Minister at Eton, had long-standing family links with the Camerons, separate from her own connections.

There had been speculation that Mrs Brooks would release text message and email exchanges.

But she said she only had six weeks of material, from the beginning of June to July 17 last year, that was on her BlackBerry.

Mrs Brooks quashed a rumour that she used to swim with Mr Murdoch when he was in London, and denied that, after she was arrested in 2005 over an alleged assault on her then husband Ross Kemp, he sent an outfit to the police station.

She was later released without charge and the police took no further action.

Mrs Brooks, 43, told the inquiry she became friendly with Tony Blair and his wife Cherie in the decade after he became leader of the Labour Party in 1995, but there were no emails or texts because Mr Blair did not have a mobile phone or use a computer.

She shed light on her tetchy relationship with Gordon Brown, describing clashes over The Sun’s decision to back the Tories at the 2010 general election.

Having tried to get hold of the then prime minister at the September 2009 Labour conference to tell him about the switch of allegiance, Mrs Brooks eventually spoke to Lord Mandelson, who seemed “quite angry, but not surprised”.

But she described an “extraordinarily aggressive” conversation with Mr Brown the following month, after The Sun criticised him for mistakes in a letter to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.