Rebekah Wade: The feisty first lady of Wapping

This week, she became the object of the ravenous media attention she normally orchestrates BY IAN IRVINE

Though the results so far are less serious, Rebekah Wade, the editor of The Sun, has also had an eventful 48 hours, also as a consequence of a misdemeanour which suddenly made her the object of the ravenous media attention which on an ordinary day it is her business to orchestrate.

On Wednesday, she and Ross Kemp, a leading EastEnders soap star and her husband of three years, were among the 20 guests at the 42nd birthday party at the Notting Hill home of their friend PR mogul Matthew Freud, whose wife is Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of Wade's employer, who was also present.

At 3am, the couple returned, in Wade's chauffeur-driven Mercedes, to their house in Battersea. An argument which began in the car continued indoors, and Kemp rang the police in a fit of anger. At 4am, four policeman arrived on their doorstep to investigate a complaint of assault by Wade. Kemp had a cut to his lip, but refused medical treatment and later said it had been sustained during the previous day's filming of his SAS television drama series Ultimate Force.

Wade was arrested and taken to a nearby police station where she was fingerprinted and had a DNA sample taken before she was locked in a cell to sleep. At 8am, Murdoch waited in vain for Wade at a scheduled breakfast meeting at Wapping. She was finally released without charge at 12am.

Instead of attending the Woman of the Year lunch as she had planned, she went straight to the offices of The Sun in Wapping to mastermind production of Friday's edition of the paper. On arrival, she joked that, with Rupert Murdoch in town, she had to have a good splash [front page story]: "So I gave him one."

Elsewhere in the media forest, it had been a febrile Thursday morning. Newsrooms were buzzing with the rumoured arrest of The Sun's editor - and some speculations about weapons and motives were very lurid. The surprising confirmation came at 11.15am on Sky News, another arm of Rupert Murdoch's empire, and reporters gleefully went to work to compose their stories for the next day's papers.

The cherry on the fairy cake came with the later revelation that the actor Steve McFadden, who plays Ross Kemp's brother in EastEnders, had also been attacked that morning at 9.35am by his ex-lover, Angela Bostock, who was also arrested and held by police. Two EastEnder soap star brothers slapped around by their women! Friday's papers would be going big on this. There was a strong feeling of Schadenfreude: newspapers are pretty robust places, but there was a rare delight in the tables being turned on the playground bully.

Newspaper editors, in general, try to lead quiet lives - or at the very least unreported ones. Andrew Neil, when he edited The Sunday Times, and Piers Morgan, when he edited the Daily Mirror, were exceptions: extroverts who delighted to appear on television and were unabashed at coverage of their adventurous social lives (Pamella Bordes for Neil, fisticuffs with Jeremy Clarkson for Morgan, for example). Most, though, follow the example of the biggest beast in the jungle, Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail. He believes his paper should speak for him and is rarely photographed or interviewed.

Wade certainly agrees. She avoids personal revelation: her entry in Who's Who is a very modest six lines, but her biography can be simply summarised. She was born in 1968, grew up in Daresbury, Cheshire, and attended Appleton Hall County Grammar School. At 14, she decided to become a journalist and began working at Eddy Shah's Messenger Group in Warrington, "making tea and helping out" at weekends and in the holidays. She later became a Young Tory.

After her A-levels, she studied French literature and language at the Sorbonne in Paris, worked briefly on a French architecture magazine, then returned to Cheshire and the Messenger Group. Initially a secretary on Shah's ill-fated non-sleazy tabloid The Post, she was described as "absolutely useless at her job, because she was too busy looking over the shoulders of the reporters and seeing how they worked". Tim Minogue, a colleague at the time, recalls that she was "very bright, very intelligent, quite good fun. But instead of taking memos, she was always bombarding the features editor with ideas for stories. I've never met anyone so burningly ambitious".

After The Post's closure, she joined the News of the World in 1989, first on the magazine, then the paper, forging a good relationship with its then editor, Piers Morgan, and rising to the post of deputy editor.

Ambitious and able, she had become one of the rising stars of Murdoch's press empire, and was expected to reach the top. At a precocious 29 she was made deputy editor of The Sun, but was disappointed when Murdoch chose David Yelland to replaced Stuart Higgins as editor in 1999. In May 2000, however, she became editor of the News of the World and maintained its four million circulation while those of her competitors dwindled. It was here she began the most controversial episode of her career: the "naming and shaming" of convicted paedophiles in the wake of the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by a man with previous convictions of sexual offences against children.

The intention was to pressure the government to pass "Sarah's Law", a public register of paedophiles, but the publication of addresses led to widespread vigilante action, often aimed at entirely innocent people. In one notorious example a paediatrician was attacked at home. This led to her sole television interview on Breakfast with Frost. David Frost was a notorious soft touch as an interviewer, first choice for the nervous, but Wade came over as articulate and amusing. She was finally obliged to end the campaign and the register was not introduced.

In January 2003 she became the first woman editor of The Sun and the first woman to edit a popular national daily. Murdoch declared: "Rebekah has proven her talent as a great campaigning editor. She has produced a popular, powerful, and often controversial News of the World. I am confident she will triumph again at The Sun."

In her speech to the staff Wade spoke of watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on television over Christmas. "At the end, when they go up in the glass elevator, Charlie asks his grandpa what happened to the little boy who got everything he ever wanted, and the grandpa says he was a very happy boy," Wade declared that was exactly how she felt.

As a founder member and former president of the organisation Women in Journalism, she had been expected to remove the Page Three lovelies as an affront to her feminist sensibilities. She didn't. On her first day at the paper a pert young woman called Rebekah from Wapping, 22, appeared topless on Page Three, a witty riposte to the humourlessness Wade believed Yelland had brought to The Sun.

In 2004, however, she did begin a high-profile campaign against the scourge of domestic violence. Five weeks ago the paper proclaimed: "The Sun's campaign against domestic violence shocked many readers - and struck a chord with those who have been abused themselves. And it's not only women who are suffering - men pointed out they have been victims of violence too. But all the readers who wrote in backed the campaign. There can never be any place for domestic violence."

At the News of the World she had honed her social skills as consummate networker, and acquired a large circle of friends in both politics - including Tony and Cherie Blair -and show business. She met Ross Kemp in 1995 at a golf tournament and the pair became engaged the following year. The papers turned it into another soap opera: Ross buys Rebekah £20,000 art deco engagement ring; Ross and Rebekah meet Tony and Cherie Blair at No 10 soiree; Ross and Rebekah go house-hunting. The wedding was called off in 1997, but the couple finally married in Las Vegas in June 2002. Kemp is now 41 and both are said to want children, though it is impossible to imagine that happening while Wade edits The Sun.

So what have been the consequences of Thursday's events? Most importantly for Wade's job, Rupert Murdoch appeared in an avuncular mood and said he was taking the whole affair "lightly". The pair had dinner together on Thursday evening and were photographed smiling and relaxed. On Newsnight Andrew Neil, drawing on his own experience with his proprietor Murdoch, drew a more sombre conclusion: her boss would support her now, but get rid of her later. "I know from my own experience that he wants his editors to edit papers, not appear in them."

The serious and tabloid press, as well as television and radio, treated the story as lightheartedly as Murdoch: it was all a bit of fun, not even a nine-day wonder. The Sun carefully finessed the story: it splashed on the McFadden/Bostock bust-up and ran their editor's embarrassment as a secondary story inside. Any hint of physical violence was suppressed. Its quote from Wade was: "It was just a silly row which got out of hand." And Kemp said; "It was a lot of fuss about nothing."

And that is how it seems likely to stay. It's all over - unless, of course, something or someone else emerges to add fresh fuel to the dying embers. Yesterday Max Clifford denied that he had been involved in a conspiracy to downgrade the story by "setting up" the McFadden/Bostock row, but suggested that some papers might have had an interest in doing so. He suggested that if there had been a conspiracy, Angela Bostock was "the weakest link", and we would have to wait until the Sunday papers appear to see if the story was truly dead.

However the Cold War nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction also applies in journalism. Editors are chary of publishing seriously damaging stories about other editors, just as proprietors are of other proprietors. Only by denying themselves the pleasure of washing their rivals' dirty linen can they feel safe themselves. The final headline for the Wade/Kemp row is likely to be "Big news in Toytown".

A Life in Brief

BORN Born 27 May 1968.

FAMILY Married Ross Kemp, Las Vegas 2002.

EDUCATION Appleton Hall County Grammar School; Sorbonne, Paris.

CAREER News of the World 1989-98: features writer, features editor, associate editor, deputy editor; The Sun 1998-1999: deputy editor; News of the World 2000-2002: editor; The Sun 2003-present: editor

SHE SAYS "It's the best job in newspapers." - on being appointed editor of The Sun.

THEY SAY "She's good at schmoozing showbusiness people. She can turn people over and have dinner with them the next day." - David Yelland, former editor of The Sun