Brooks says Blair was "constant presence" Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks gives evidence at the Leveson inquiry Rebekah Brooks told the Leveson inquiry on Friday she had only incomplete information about her contacts with politicians such as Tony Blair and David Cameron because News International, her previous employer, had retained them. The former chief executive of NI was under scrutiny by the inquiry over how she cultivated contacts with top politicians and what this gained for her and her business in exchange. She said that "Tony Blair and his circle were a constant presence in my life" during her period as an editor first at the News of the World and more so at The Sun. But she demurred when Robert Jay QC, counsel for the inquiry, suggested that she had been fed titbits of information by Mr Blair's government in return for political support from The Sun. Mrs Brooks, who is not being questioned about the phone-hacking scandal that led to the demise of the News of the World because she is a suspect in three separate police investigations, said the role of journalists like her was not to take part in spats between politicians, such that between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, his chancellor and successor. "We have to look at all the events and stories and analyse them in a just and proper way," she said. She conceded that by the end of that episode, The Sun had taken the side of Mr Blair, but she added: "It wasn't a playground spat, we were a newspaper looking after the real serious concerns of our readers. It wasn't that I would stand in one corner of the playground and Alan Rusbridger [editor of the Guardian] would stand in the other. It wouldn't work like that. Mrs Brooks declined to say which politicians had sent her commiserations when she stepped down as chief executive of NI, saying instead that she had "indirect messages ... from No. 10 [Downing Street], No. 11, the Home Office, the Foreign Office ... but not many from Labour politicians. The inquiry was expected to move on to her relations with David Cameron and the coalition, but she said at the beginning of her evidence that her recollections would be based on incomplete email and text evidence because her work computer and phone were in the possession of her previous employers.