I’ve predicted for months, and it’s now been confirmed by what the Independent describes as ‘senior party insiders’, that top Tory spinner, Andy Coulson will not be going to Downing Street if/when David Cameron wins the General Election next spring.

Although there are no complaints about his performance, it was always going to be too ticklish to harbour the man who was in charge of the reporters at the News of the World who were jailed for shamelessly raiding the voicemails of the princes and their staff at Clarence House, particularly as  Cameron will be going round to brief Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace each week.

Coulson claimed when the reporters were caught that he hadn’t known what they were doing, a scenario so implausible that no commentators have ever taken his denial seriously. Certainly the way the whole scheme was set up to deflect all the blame away from management onto the hapless private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and past-his-sell-by-date Royal hack, Clive Goodman has all the signs of a wheeze cooked up by wily old Screws managing editor Stuart Kuttner, who was quite prepared to see the two of them hung out to dry once the raiding of the voicemails was discovered, as it was absolutely bound to be. How far he went in convincing Mulcaire, who is a fundamentally a careful and law-abiding man, that he wasn’t breaking the law is hard to establish, for Mulcaire, with a wife and five children to support keeps very quiet about it – possibly because, according to an unchallenged report in Private Eye, in a fit of kindness or, more likely, fear, in 2007 the Screws paid him a sum not unadjacent to £200,000.

The chances of Andy Coulson not knowing about it are not unadjacent to zero.

Although I and several others have repeatedly asked Coulson directly if he knew what was going on, he has never categorically denied it – and the simple salient fact remains that if he knew, he was party to, and therefore chargeable with an imprisonable  offence, along with slippery old Stuart K.

Not surprising , then that Cameron and his crew have seen fit to bid their media pilot goodbye.

I have thought that Coulson must be thinking about moving into Rebekah Wade’s editorial chair at the Sun, a natural step up from editing the Screws, and likely to become available, as it happens, very soon after the election. But there is a feeling among the Tories whom he has come to know, that he will move into the potentially far more lucrative, if less powerful and exposed field of Public Relations.

I wonder. Anyone want a wager?

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