Rebekah Brooks's husband may have been foolish and stupid, but he is not a criminal mastermind, the jury in the phone-hacking trial has been told. Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer, was described by his counsel as a man who was "not academically gifted" and who had a string of failed businesses behind him.
He was prone to doing "daft" things such as drinking a pint of washing-up liquid, but not to orchestrating crime, said Neil Saunders.
In his closing speech, Saunders told jurors that Brooks knows that he was stupid and unwise to have hidden his porn collection and laptop the day his wife was arrested in 2011, but that was all he did. He did not, as the prosecution allege, enlist others to help him conceal and destroy evidence that would have been of interest to police investigating his wife, said Saunders.
"This is a man capable of drinking a bottle of Fairy Liquid. He is not, I would suggest, capable of committing a criminal offence." The jury had been told that he had drunk the washing-up liquid to "rid himself of the excesses of the night before".
The counsel for News International security chief Mark Hanna told jurors that if his client was guilty of perverting the course of justice the prosecution would have to prove that Brooks warned him he was going to destroy the evidence incriminating his wife and then invited him and "a load of others" to assist him.
If Brooks were the "Moriarty of the Chipping Norton set", intent on destroying evidence for his wife, he could just have gone to the local tip near their country home in Oxfordshire, said William Clegg QC, instead of taking it to London and hiding it behind a rubbish tip in the underground car park at their Chelsea Harbour home.
Clegg said it suited the prosecution to "promote Mark Hanna up the corporate ladder" to make it seem more likely that Brooks had confided in him and enlisted him in the conspiracy. He told jurors that in truth his client was a just "hired hand" who never met Tony Blair or mixed in the "glamorous" world inhabited by others on the indictment.
Hanna was a middle-ranking manager who "walked the boundary … looking for trespassers" while his boss and her husband were "dining in style" at Enstone Manor in Oxfordshire in the days before Brooks's arrest, Clegg said. He said it also suited prosecutor Andrew Edis to describe Hanna as a "distinguished" former soldier but "it was not a compliment intended to help".
In a reference to the former archbishop of Canterbury and a peer who were called to testify on behalf of the former managing editor of the News of the World, he added: "He may not mix in the circles of the great and the good – there was no archbishop or peer of realm speak for him. The only time he [Hanna] has seen Tony Blair is on the telly."
Brooks and Hanna deny all charges. Closing speeches for the seven defendants in the 125-day trial are complete, with the judge's summing-up to follow before the jury are sent out to consider their verdicts.
