LITMIR.BIZ

EIGHT

       Coulson Departure

      May 2010–February 2011

      ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ It is Saturday 25 September 2010 and George Osborne is on his knees. He is fixated on the television screen, in the company of Cameron and Andy Coulson. It isn’t positive news of the latest quarterly figures that has brought him to this position. It is something that he knows will have a much greater bearing on the outcome of the 2015 election. Ed Miliband is announced leader of the Labour Party, beating brother David by only just over 1% of the vote (50.65% to 49.35%), and Cameron’s team are fizzing with excitement. For the first three rounds of counting, David was ahead of his brother, but in the fourth and final ballot Ed edged over the 50% mark required for overall victory. While David is supported by most Labour MPs and constituency parties, Ed has secured the backing of the trade unions, sufficient to tip the balance in his favour. Cameron and Osborne fear David. They don’t fear Ed. Cameron agrees with his ultra-political strategist-in-chief. ‘Ed will be a thousand times better for the Conservatives,’ he says. Ed Miliband will take Labour more in the direction of Gordon Brown’s failed policies and he is ‘much less confident’ than his brother, he thinks – not that he knows either brother well.

      The news plays into their hands at the party conference in Birmingham the following week, the first for fourteen years in which they have been in power. Cameron’s team had sought to undermine Labour’s conference by arguing that when the party was in power, it had brought the country to its knees with its spending and borrowing. Now that Ed, a principal architect of that strategy, is the leader, it is a much more telling line of attack.

      The Tories start arriving in Birmingham in high spirits. They cheer to the rafters when Osborne announces a benefit cap of £500 per week per household.1 Boris Johnson, always a conference favourite, further whips up the delegates when he announces he will run for re-election as London mayor in 2012. David Cameron delivers a feel-good speech, light on policy commitments. It is not the product of intensive preparation as his conference speeches are to be later. Cameron and Osborne have piloted the party into government, are sorting out the national finances, and are overseeing a frantic pace of domestic reform. For all the early criticism of Plan A and the pain likely to be endured, the novelty of coalition government has not yet worn off in the public’s mind. But the storm clouds are gathering. Cameron and Osborne are about to reveal how naive and inexperienced they both still can be.

      In late 2006, one year into Cameron’s leadership of the party, they were not getting their message across and concluded they needed a dynamic head of press. Rupert Murdoch was far from impressed with Cameron at the time, considering him little more than ‘a PR guy’. Conscious of their upper-middle-class backgrounds, Cameron and Osborne searched for a ballsy figure with the common touch to project their modernising message more effectively to the country at large. They were not inundated with contenders. Enter Andy Coulson. On 26 January 2007, he had resigned as editor of the News of the World, denying all personal knowledge of phone hacking but taking responsibility for it having occurred under his watch as editor.2 Osborne had got to know Coulson, while Cameron had met him a few times when Coulson was still editor. It was Osborne who first identified Coulson as a candidate for the new role of director of communications. When Osborne met him to float the idea, he was quickly convinced that the former tabloid editor could give them the populist edge they needed to take the fight to Labour.

      Coulson met Cameron in his Norman Shaw South office in the spring of 2007. Cameron talked about the job and liked what Coulson had to say: he asked about the hacking concern, and Coulson reassured him about his own role in the affair. Cameron did not probe him deeply, anxious perhaps not to frighten him off, and avoided asking the most searching questions. Coulson subsequently saw Steve Hilton and then Francis Maude and Ed Llewellyn together. Later that spring, Cameron phoned Coulson while on holiday in Cornwall. Coulson again reassured him he knew nothing of the antics of Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s royal reporter who had been convicted of phone hacking.3 That was the green light Cameron needed. At the end of May, Coulson’s appointment was announced.

      The first two years went smoothly. Coulson was rigorously professional, and his skill at bringing discipline to the relationship between the Conservative leadership and the media was prized highly by Cameron’s team. ‘What was there not to like,’ one insider said, ‘his understanding of the media was brilliant. He proved much stronger at broadcasting than people thought. He was from Essex. He had edited a red top and had a sophisticated political brain.’ Coulson began rapidly to secure much better headlines for the Conservatives, and for a time all was relatively calm. He achieved the ultimate accolade of admission to the inner circle of Osborne, Llewellyn, Hilton and Kate Fall.

      The Guardian had been engaged in a long investigation into phone hacking, and refused to let the matter rest. Hot in pursuit also were two Labour MPs, Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. In July 2009, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee summoned Coulson to appear before it to investigate phone hacking. Again Coulson denied any knowledge. The committee concluded, however, that it was ‘inconceivable’ that News of the World executives had not known about phone hacking, accusing them of suffering from ‘collective amnesia’.4

      Cameron felt that Coulson was being unfairly victimised, and on 9 July said: ‘I believe in giving people a second chance.’5 He considered that Coulson had already paid for any errors or oversights when he lost the editorship of a high-profile paper, and said he believed that the attacks were politically motivated. Murdoch had slowly begun to approve of the direction Cameron was leading the Conservative Party in, and during the Labour Party conference in late September 2009, with Labour probably at its lowest point since the night of the 1992 election, the Sun announced that it would be supporting the Conservatives at the upcoming general election, having supported Labour for the previous twelve years and three general elections.

      However, concerns about Coulson refused to go away. In early 2010, the Guardian reported that Coulson had employed a private detective who had been jailed for conspiracy.6 The paper then followed up with calls to Steve Hilton, but it is unclear whether Hilton informed Cameron himself.7 Representations came into Number 10, reportedly from Buckingham Palace and the upper echelons of Whitehall, questioning the suitability of Coulson moving into Number

Скачать книгу