What price privacy?  Murdoch's women and their outpourings of love

A scrap of paper, a computer file. Private thoughts not meant for sharing, a declaration of love in a letter that may never have been sent. 

What right have newspapers to dabble in such things? How intrusive. Is this not the sort of thing Leveson was supposed to stop?

But there they are , on screen last night and in print today. And who will object? The schadenfreude is so delicious that only the most saintly privacy campaigner will be able to resist.

For yesterday we learnt in the most Cartland-rich terms the extent of  Wendi Deng's crush on Tony Blair and been reminded of Rebekah Brooks's outpouring of love for fellow editor and phone hacking defendant Andy Coulson.
What humiliation for Rupert Murdoch, his wife and his protege both exposed in their weak-at-the-knees moments on the same day.

Vanity Fair distributed a link to an article in the March edition by Mark Seal that includes this passage from a note Deng had written to herself 

“Oh, shit, oh, shit. Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt . . . And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage . . . and what else and what else and what else . . . ”

This is, of course, no evidence of an affair. It could have been written by any besotted 14-year-old about Harry Styles. But it is evidence of betrayal.  And of a powerful woman unable to keep a lid on her feelings.

The Brooks letter also shows a woman of great authority battling with tangled emotions. It was handed to the Old Bailey jury on the last day of the prosecution yesterday and for four minutes and forty-four seconds the court was silent as they read. Four minutes and forty-four seconds that Brooks had to endure with her husband on one side and her former lover two chairs away on the other.

The Wapping diary

The barbed wire has gone, the newspapers have moved out, the developers have moved in. Twenty-eight years ago the News International plant was the scene of revolution and riot. 
This is a personal journal of what it was like to live and work through those early days
The court had heard last year some of what she'd written - the mixture of love and confusion, loyalty and professionalism - and the extracts were read out again today to reinforce the jurors' reading. They show her struggle to keep the private and the professional separate - remember she had been his boss and now they were equals. She reassures him about his relationships with Murdoch and Les Hinton, yet her own insecurity shines through. Six years into their affair she was writing:

"Without our relationship in my life, I am really not sure how I will cope. I’m frightened to be without you...you said I had to email you if anything important happened - like if I was ill? I don’t understand this, we are either there for each other or not surely?

"Anyway, that really isn’t where I am confused. I know what horror it means and I know why we have to stick to it. But for example, how does this work thing manifest itself. Do we limit contact until we absolutely have to - like leaving our execs to sort run of the mill joint stuff? I don’t want to get this wrong."

Brooks emerges the more controlled of the two women - as Andrew Edis QC told the court last autumn, her letter was an intelligent, elegant well-written document. 

But this isn't about her. Nor is it about Deng. There will be dinosaurs who see these notes as proving that all women are tender flowers who aren't up to the world of business. There will be columnists  who shake their heads and tut: 'First rule, never write anything down.'

But the person who emerges as the weakest player is Murdoch himself, Murdoch the cuckold, Murdoch the old fool led a merry dance by a pair of pretty women young enough to be his granddaughters. 

And so, SubScribe suspects, there will be few complaints about intrusion of privacy today.