By Martin Hickman.Rebekah Brooks could not have agreed to the hacking of Milly Dowler because she was on holiday at the time, her lawyer told the phone hacking trial today.Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, for Mrs Brooks, said the News of the World's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, tasked a private detective to intercept the missing girl's messages on Wednesday 10 April 2002.Yet, he added, Mrs Brooks was on holiday in Dubai and phone records for incoming and outgoing calls to her mobile showed she had no contact with the paper before Thursday 11 April 2002.That meant, Mr Laidlaw said, that Mrs Brooks could not have agreed to the hacking.He told the jury at the Old Bailey: "If there's one thing you can be sure about in this case is that Rebekah Brooks is not guilty of the hacking of Milly's phone. "She was on holiday when the hacking of Milly's phone took place."The interception of a message about a job interview mistakenly left for Milly by a recruitment agency prompted the News of the World to print a story about the mystery call on Saturday 13 April.Mr Laidlaw disputed the evidence of a witness, William Hennessey, who told the court that while he was with Mrs Brooks in Dubai that Friday or Saturday she broke off from the meeting mentioning something important about "a missing Surrey schoolgirl."Mr Laidlaw told the jury: "You may think Mr Hennessey's evidence is not very reliable, at all."He also dismissed as "outrageous" the prosecution's speculation that the exchange of two texts between Mrs Brooks and the NoW's acting editor, Andy Coulson, at 9.08pm and 9.12pm that Saturday, 13 April 2002, were about the story.He reminded the jury that the lead prosecutor, Andrew Edis QC, wondered whether the texts might have related to the downgrading of the recruitment agency story at 9.30pm that night after it had been rubbished by the police.The defence's own work had exposed that the story had been moved later, between the second and third editions, Mr Laidlaw told the jury.He said there were any number of reasons why News of the World staff would not have told Mrs Brooks about the hacking once she was in contact with the paper on Thursday 11 April, and on her return to the UK the following week, when she was unlikely to have noticed the downgraded, page 30 story about Milly.As evidence of Mrs Brooks' ignorance of the hacking, Mr Laidlaw quoted private texts she had sent to colleagues in the aftermath of the Guardian's story revealing the targeting of the 13-year-old in July 2011. To Sun political editor, Mrs Brooks texted: "Thanks, Tom. We thought there would be a hit on Sky, but if this is true, it's absolutely sickening."Mrs Brooks told columnist Sue Carroll: "Not sure if true, but bloody awful if it is."Mr Laidlaw said that the Milly Dowler story was the only story from phone hacking printed in the News of the World during his client's editorship.Turning to the hacking of firefighters union leader Andy Gilchrist, he told the court: "No story resulted from the hacking of his phone by Mulcaire at the News of the World in December 2002."Mr Laidlaw also said hacking could not have been responsible for the kiss and tell story on Mr Gilchrist published in the Sun on 13 January 2003 (which Mrs Brooks had just started editing), because that relationship had been over for four years old and two witnesses had told the court that the tale had come from a member of the public.He said: "It's little short of absurd to suggest there's any valuable evidence in this."He also rejected the prosecution's suggestion that Mrs Brooks had learned the identity of David Blunkett's lover from her own occasional lover Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, which had been hacking the Home Secretary's phone.Mr Laidlaw suggested that, instead, Mrs Brooks had established Kimberley Quinn's name from a phone call with Mr Blunkett's special advisor, Huw Evans. Mr Laidlaw told the court: "She didn't get the name from Andy Coulson. Lovers they may have been but there was no love lost between their papers."All defendants deny the charges. The jury is expected to retire on Monday 9 June.