A soap star's wife, an Ivy Restaurant stalwart and now the chief
of the country's highest-selling daily newspaper, Rebekah Wade has
reached, in tabloid terms, her media mecca. Dubbed the "Red
Top's red top" for her pre-Raphaelite tresses, Wade is the
Sun's first female editor.
Despite a formidable work schedule, Wade finds time to mix with
the same celebrities and politicians often pilloried in her pages.
Out with her husband, former-EastEnder and New Labour fan Ross Kemp,
she was even pictured hugging Cherie Blair.
This was before the Prime Minister's wife discovered that Wade's
team were trying to catch her in deep financial chat with slimming
tea and property guru Peter Foster. The ladies' friendship has since
cooled.
Equipped with a socialite's charm and a racehorse's stamina, Wade
is fuelled by steely ambition. It has propelled her through the
industry's glass ceilings, since she made her choice of career,
aged 14.
Wade cut her journalistic teeth on an architecture magazine in
Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne. She has been a long-time
Murdoch employee, working her way up from the News of the World's
colour magazine to become, by 2000, the youngest editor in Fleet
Street.
Her tenure at this top-selling weekly was punctuated by her "naming
and shaming" of known paedophiles, after the murder of schoolgirl
Sarah Payne. Only after attacks on innocent men, riots in Portsmouth
and the vilification of even some "paediatricians", did
Wade reluctantly pull the plug on the campaign.
In her debut editorial at the Sun, Wade announced to the Government,
"It's time to say we're very disappointed", but she has
been more circumspect in her approach to the delights of Page 3.
Wade's dislike of the bosomed bevy is well established, but her
Australian proprietor remains a fan, and Wade has yet to wield her
paperknife on this particular phenomenon.
After all, the lady some cynics call Rupert Murdoch's "in-house
lap-dog" will not risk biting the hand that feeds, and certainly
Rebekah Wade is smart enough to know when things are going her way.
On her first day in the job she's coveted for 20 years, this consummate
media operator was asked how she felt. Like Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, she said, "the little boy who got everything he ever
wanted".
Caroline Frost
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