Andy Coulson’s been out of the news since his new salary was as No 10’s head spinner was revealed a month ago.
Not for long.
Coulson’s spectacular stonewalling, sidestepping and truth economy that we witnessed last year in front of the Commons Culture Committee are about to turn round and bite him (and his trusting boss) in the arse.
A lot of hard-working journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been working on this important revelation of the truth since Nick Davies of the Guardian, a year ago today, revealed that The News of the World had paid off Gordon Taylor for hacking his phone.
However adept the Screws people have become at covering their tracks and misleading their interrogators, when up against investigative reporters of quality, they are bound sooner or later to stub their toes.
So far, the only head among the foul-smelling cabal that has run the country’s most shameful Sunday paper to have been sacrificed is that of former managing editor Stuart Kuttner – ignominiously sacked after twenty years of journalistic malpractice.

Who will follow?
Among those who are having difficulty keeping their breaklfast down since an unexpected visitor at Wapping from New York last month are Tom Crone, Les Hinton and, most significant of all, Andy Coulson.

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Rebekah “Babbling” Brooks announces that two News International titles under her control will start charging for online access come next May.
I understand that serious, quality newsgathering has to be paid for, and I deplore the fact that when the time comes (as it will) in which all commercially published newspapers have to charge for their online content in order to supplement the dwindling hard copy sales that currently pay for quality journalism, the BBC will still be offering it for free, subsidised by the licence payers.
This will be profoundly unfair, and massively damaging to non-state owned independent newspapers. The BBC will owe it to the British public who fund it to abandon this anomaly.
It became clear during the London ‘Freeshite’ bonanza that hard copy papers given away for nothing are worth, in news terms, a lot less than the paper on which they are printed [and not even a healthy arse-wiping option].
Similarly, Mrs Brooks evidently doesn’t feel she can charge for online content of her two prominent best-selling ShagRags – the Sun and the Screws – no quality journalism to pay for there. (Unfortunately she does have a number of lawyers’ bills and penalties to pay for a pile of upcoming damages for illegal phone-hacking, and they still have to fork out for unproductive journo-nasties like Mazher Mahmood, because he knows all the dirt on sensitive former execs, like Les Hinton and Andy Coulson – not to mention Stuart Kuttner).

Still, one must – albeit grudgingly – hail Ol’ Rumplechops for having the bollocks to lead where others will have to follow.

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George Osborne is widely perceived by many potential conservative voters as the wobbly plank in David Cameron’s platform.
   It isn’t simply that Osborne looks and sounds too young and inexperienced ; there is also an air of supercilious knowingness about him which effectively trumps Cameron’s sincerity.
   He had a chance to show depth and honesty in autumn 2008, the day he had delivered one of his most convincing speeches to the party conference at a time when the full scale of the disastrous mess the bankers had made for us all was still emerging. On television that evening he was presented with a critical moment at which he could have shown sincerity, humility and credibility (if he possessed such qualities).
   He gave a long, wide-ranging interview about the banking crisis, in which he could have owned up to the conservatives’ share of the blame.
   But at no point did he acknowledge or apologise for his party’s absence of criticism of the bankers’ behaviour, or his own silence on the government’s lack of control over the excessive risks being taken by most of Britain’s larger financial institutions.
   Here was a moment when he could have shown courage, by admitting to the electorate, “We should have done more – much more – but we didn’t.”

Another aspect of the liability which Osborne represents for his party lies in the origin of his very close relationship with Andy Coulson, the disgraced former editor of the News of the World.
   This friendship goes back several years, to autumn 2005, just before the annual conference, when Coulson ran a front page splash in the Screws…
   TOP TORY, COKE AND THE HOOKER
   Illustrated with pictures of the angel-faced Shadow Chancellor, it claimed that eleven years before, while he was at Oxford, the then flawless Osborne was said, without any convincing corroboration, to have looked on while ‘dominatrix’ hooker, Natalie Rowe, snorted a line of coke. Her boyfriend, an unnamed friend of Osborne’s had gone on to become an addict, the report alleged.
   It was, on closer inspection, an archetypal Screws non-story, devoid of any hard content, worded so as to avoid any come-back, but just salacious enough to justify its front page status, and, of course, devoid of any genuine revelations about the politician, beyond the fact that in his youth he’d had a friend who knew a prostitute and who’d become addicted to an unspecified drug.
   When the story appeared, I remember being struck not by the damage that might have been done to the ambitious young politician, but by how much good it had done him. After all, the story didn’t say George himself had actually done anything at all.
   He hadn’t snorted the coke, and he hadn’t taken advantage of the hooker’s professional skills, ‘dominatrix’ or otherwise. But it did make him look, by association, as if he’d lived a bit and had a touch of grubby humanity to him, which went a long way to counter the unsexy image of a choir-boy-coiffed goody-two-shoes, that must have been causing concern in the Party’s image department.
   In a well-constructed profile of Coulson in the Guardian, John Harris noted that Osborne and Coulson had ‘got on well’, even while discussing the Screws ‘exposé’, although, at the time the article was published, the people around Osborne told Harris that he was suffering severe tummy rumbles and telling everyone how upset he was.
   Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
   There’d be little point in constructing a subtle piece of well-spun double-bluff, then rushing around telling people how chuffed about it you were. For this astutely ironic act of spin, Andy established his credentials with Osborne and, at least covertly, made his political allegiance known.
George and Andy were still in touch after Andy’s resignation from the Screws for his role in the Royal phone hacking debacle, and it was then that Osborne persuaded his boss that Coulson was just the man to give the white-tie-and-tails Bullingdon folk some much-needed street cred among the elusive middle ground voters.

Osborne no doubt sees it as part of his job to get close to people of great wealth and commercial power, as evidenced by his presence in Corfu in Autumn 2008, when he skipped between three monster yachts belonging to the Murdochs, Rupert’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, and Russian mega-oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, from whom he famously failed to extract a donation (while crapping on his old friendship with the mightily oofy Nathaniel Rothschild). He happily allowed himself to be pampered and wooed by Ole Rumplechops and his Titian-tressed larrikin, Rebekah Brooks, while at home Andy Coulson strengthened the bonds between the Tories and News Corp.
   This relationship has been almost irrevocably sealed by the Sun’s conversion to the Conservative cause, the party’s concurrence with Murdoch briefing on the BBC, and the continuing, high risk loyalty being shown to Coulson despite all the outrageous lapses of memory and lacunae of knowledge he displayed in front of the Commons Culture Media & Sport Committee last summer.
   It is this relationship, more than anything Gordon does or doesn’t do, that will do the real damage to Cameron’s electoral chances among the voters that matter – those who take the trouble to scrutinise and weigh the issues before they vote, rather than those who simply vote along tribal lines.
   It’s too late re-instate Ken Clarke where he belongs, which would appease a lot of the wavering conservative support (while the Europhobes will still vote for Cameron, rather than Nigel Farrago.)
   But it’s not too late to ask Coulson to go.
   If the Tories don’t dump him, but still get in, are they ready to risk the great flock of chickens out there, flapping their wings before coming home to roost on Coulson’s back, come the autumn?

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Max Clifford’s legal team, barrister Jeremy Reed, and solicitor Charlotte Harris (bright and sexy in six inch heels) on Wednesday gave the News of the World a good trouncing in the first skirmish of a High Court battle over the paper’s (one is supposed to say “alleged”) raid on the formidable publicist’s voicemail. This represents another step closer to the truth, which the paper has been desperately trying to hide, about the way their journalists have been systemically, and with the full knowledge of management, breaking the law to discover personal details of celebrities and thereby create invasive, damaging stories about them which are of no public interest. Significantly, so far, only the Guardian has chosen to report this result.
Clifford’s lawyers had asked for and were granted by Mr Justice Vos three specific orders for disclosure – despite the Screws’ peevish objections.
       First, they required Glenn Mulcaire, the investigator responsible for accessing Clifford’s voicemails, to disclose which individual or individuals (editor at the time: slippery spinner, Andy Coulson) asked/ suggested/ ordered him to perform this illegal act, which was included in his conviciton after he pleaded guilty 3 years ago to hacking into the Royal Household phones.
       Mulcaire, second defendant, has also already admitted Max Clifford’s claim, but, as his counsel explained, the father of five children under 16 is out of work (having made known his intention not to return to the snooping game) and living on job-seekers’ allowance. Even taking that with a hefty helping of sodium chloride, the judge might well have asked who was paying his legal bills, and how he would pay any damages awarded against him. But then, it’s not inconceivable that the paper is picking up these tabs – especially if it was they who got him into trouble in the first place by pressurising him to do what he did. If this is so, though, it would undoubtedly make some people think that the way he frames his responses might be influenced by News Group’s support. The paper’s bosses would probably like him to say that he was on a fishing expedition on his own account, and luckily stumbled across messages left by (and the mobile nos. of) several of Mr C’s hapless, high profile clients, and passed them to the lucky hacks without saying where or how he found them.
       He’s also been asked to reveal to whom he passed the contents of any voicemails acquired by him from this source, and to name anyone whom he might have instructed on how to access the voicemails themselves. The judge accepted the absolute necessity of this, and ordered that this information be made available to the claimants within 14 days.

Clifford’s counsel also requested that the News of the World release details of the secret settlement they reached out of court with Professional Footballers’ Association boss, Gordon Taylor for invading his privacy by accessing his voicemails (to which Mulcaire had also pleaded guilty).  And the court was treated to the strange sight of Taylors’ brief, Manual Barker standing alongside counsel for the Screws, who only last year had to pay Taylor £700k+ for their crimes. Now both parties were intent – for their differing reasons – on not letting the public see what they had agreed. The judge sensibly granted that while private details of Gordon Taylor’s messages which the paper had illegally acquired should remain secret, the terms and conditions and, significantly – the sums paid by the paper in recompense should be released to the claimant’s lawyers under strict terms of confidentiality.
Thirdly he ordered that the Information Commissioner’s Office should be allowed to release (which they have asserted they are happy to do) all data, files and documents accumulated during their investigation into illicit information  gathering which resulted in the 2006 report, What Price Privacy, specifically those relating to News of the World journalists. The Screws claimed this was irrelevant, because it contained no information on phone hacking; Clifford’s lawyers said it would help to establish that there was an endemic culture of illegal information gathering at the newspaper, and how phone hacking was a natural extension of the activities in which they’d been engaged for years.
 
Next time….
Clifford asks the Metropolitan Police to release the stack of documents they took from Mulcaire’s office when they arrested him in August 2006.

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The Commons Culture, Media, Sport Select Committee would like to talk to Rebekah Brooks, the titian-tressed scrapper who has been suprema of News International since last September. If she complies with their request to see them – and she will try very hard to wriggle out of it – it is to be hoped that she’ll shed more light on criminal activities at the News of the World than did Senior executives Tom Crone (Head of Legals), Stuart Kuttner (ex-Managing Editor), and former editor Andy Coulson, when they were called to give evidence over their phone-hacking to the Committee last summer. She may also remember more than Les Hinton, who was in her current chair when the raiding of the Royal voicemails came to light in August 2006. In September he spoke to the Committee by video link from New York, where he is now boss of the Murdochs’ Wall Street Journal. He had no recollection about key decisions, such as were the hackers paid off after being sacked for their criminal activity.

To the intense frustration of the committee and of those who care about the quality of British journalism, all the witnesses turned out to be suffering from an acute attack of contagious amnesia and truth frugalness. [See my blog] For these are people who have made their careers at Rupert’s Red Tops, delivering ‘journalism’ of such obfuscation and dishonesty, for so long, that it’s far too late to kick the habit.
   In a pitiful attempt to mislead the committee, they all ‘forgot’, or just ‘didn’t know’ any details relating to the events that culminated in the jailing of their Royal Editor, Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire, a Private Investigator contracted to the paper.
   In October, the Committee, determined not to be fobbed off with the persistent ducking and diving of the Screws bosses, formally posed a number of questions for them.
Among several anomalies that had arisen, they wished to know “the grounds on which advice was given to settle the claims [allegedly] made by Goodman and Mulcaire and the level of payments made”.
   Rebekah Brooks has now submitted her response. (This was viewable on the Committee’s page at www.parliament.uk up to 13th Jan.) Written in characteristic News of the World house style and buried in a miasma of obscured truth and elusive fact, it fails to answer either of these questions.
   With unexpected eagerness, she puts her hand up in conceding Goodman’s alleged claim for unfair dismissal. As they had “failed to meet minimum requirements” in relation to a dismissal, any affected employee would be entitled to bring a claim, “with a potential compensatory award of up to £60,600 (in addition to any contractual notice pay entitlement).”
But she also tells the Committee that the paper settled before a case was heard by any tribunal. The hypothetical sums and conditions she cites have no bearing on what they actually paid Goodman for signing “a standard-form News International compromise agreement,” – a euphemism for gagging agreement – and this despite the breach of his employment contract through his proven criminal activity. 
   The decoys and the irrelevant waffle in her answers were composed in order to put Rebekah Brooks’ pursuers off the scent; but, like much of the content of the News of the World, the result is ham-fisted, half-baked and easily seen through. There is an almost engaging naivety to her signing off. “… We trust that the answers given in this letter can now bring matters to a close.”
   Keep trusting, TestaRossa! Most observers will understand the subtext to her answer…..

You might think we gave them lots of money to shut them up and stop them telling the rest of the media who within the Screws hierarchy knew they’d deliberately broken the law by hacking into voicemails to get cheapo front page splashes, but you can’t prove it – so there!

The simple fact is that Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed for what they did. It follows therefore, that any other members of the Screws staff who were party to it are also liable to criminal prosecution and a jail sentence, including Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner.
The committee have shown commendable resolve in their pursuit of the truth over these activities.

They have a clear right and a public duty to insist on clear, frank and truthful answers from Rebekah Brooks.

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