One can understand Mr Cameron’s reluctance to give up having Rebekah Brooks’ old mate in the office next door, but the damage this is doing to the credibility and goodwill which the country is generally prepared to show the new PM must far outweigh the benefits of that proximity.

Naively, in a discussion on BBC Radio Wales yesterday, I suggested that there were Tories who would be delighted to see the back of Couson; I cited John Whittingdale, Tory chairman of the Culture Media Sport Committee, for having been vigorous in his pursuit of truth from the News of the World. When the paper’s management Andy Coulson, Stuart Kuttner (managing editor) and Tom Crone (legal boss) appeared in front of his committee last year they lied so blatantly in their claims that they remembered nothing that committee members and watching journalists were laughing.

Coulson had been asked point blank by Welsh committee member, Adam Price how The News of the World had been able to run a story (by as yet uncharged Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck) entirely based on a message left on Prince Harry’s voicemail by his brother William, which could have been obtained by no other means than illegal voice-mail hacking, without the editor questioning its provenance and the way it was acquired.

            The story was prominent – the whole of page 7 – with a front page “exclusive” banner trail. The crassness of running a story so obviously acquired in this way is mind-boggling, but not as utterly incredible as Coulson’s reply that, as editor at the time, he knew absolutely nothing about it and had no memory of the story. Any reasonable jury would have deemed this evidence enough of Coulson’s complicity with his reporters’ illegal news-gathering. The footage from the committee proceedings was shown to an incredulous nation on Channel 4 news that evening.

The committee even concluded in their report last February that they had encountered a stone-wall of “collective amnesia”. But yesterday, not half an hour after I’d been commending the independent and objective stance of his chairmanship, John Whittingdale was on BBC’s World at One saying that his committee had to accept Coulson’s denial as they had no other evidence, and that there was no further case to answer.

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?

       Having, with customary irritating hubris, taken responsibility for getting New Labour elected in ’97, the Shag-Rag makes no apologies for having persuaded their readers to vote for a party who they now claim has done bugger all - listing their failures in a garbled, Sun-style, bullet-pointed rant, put out by its new young editor and World Big-Brother expert, Dominic Mohan.

To this was added specific support for David Cameron – not very surprising, given that young Dave’s head spinner (still disgracefully and dangerously in place at Central Office) is Andy Coulson, notorious purveyor of non-truth and serious amnesiac, who was a Screws editor as well as confidant and assistant to the Testarossa, Rebekah (Wade) Brooks, CEO of Murdoch’s British papers.

Even if the ‘readers’ of the daily ShagRag could be bothered to read its puerile piffling editorials, they’re not going to be swayed by anything it has to say. That’s not why they buy the Sun. And Young David should stop letting Andy persuade him otherwise. It’s like trying to bribe the voters with a pair of Page 3 tits, and it demeans a grown-up political party. And PS, Dave…… keeping Andy on the team may just make Rupert feel he’s lot more important than he is.

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?

The old boy forgave her though, and she is strongly tipped to move up to the top shelf at News International UK, although she has promised him she will stay on as editor of leading Shag-Rag, the Sun until after the general election. Maybe, if the Boy Dave gets in, he will, as I have previously predicted, feel he must ditch his tainted chief spinner, Andy Coulson, who will then be free to come back to Wapping and take over Rebekah’s chair. But will he be able to give up some of the nasty habits he learned from Stuart Kuttner while editing the News of the Screws?

I just want to use the headline before the subs on the Sun, the Mirror, or even one of the junior ShagRags get round to it.

The truth is, you see, that like several other thinking folk who ought to know better, I do have a sneaking admiration for the punning art of the tabloid headline writer.

Consider the brutal frankness of the headline that topped a story of Prince Philip dropping a clanger in China, when he asked some British students who’d been there a while if they’d developed slitty eyes…

GREAT WALLY OF CHINA

Or the sports sub who headlined a report of a tiny Scottish league member, Inverness Caledonian Thistle unexpectedly beating the mighty Celtic in (I suppose) a Scottish FA Cup match. The team is known affectionately as ‘Caley’ – pronounced ‘Kally’; the ingenious headline writer produced…

SUPER-CALEY-WERE-FANTASTIC-CELTIC-WERE-ATROCIOUS.

M’dear old friend, Frank Keating is so old that he remembers a headline from the late ‘50s, era of the kitchen sink drama. It headed a frankly minor story which dealt with a shortage of funds in an Essex library leading to a paucity of books on the shelves…

BOOK LACK IN ONGAR

I can think of few jobs I would enjoy more than sitting around thinking up horrible puns to headline tabloid stories, although I imagine doing it every day would pall and lead to some kind of mental disfunction.

When my book News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings came out, and Mazher Mahmood threatened to sue, I anticipated the headline…

SHEIKH RATTLED AND ROLLED

But although Mazher’s ire was reported, no one used the obvious tag (or never thought of it).

When George Bush fails to invite some notable to his farewell party in the White House, will the Sun say…

SNUBYAH!!

Or when a Premier League footballer breaks his ankle just before the big Boxing Day match…

I’M DREAMING OF A SHITE CHRISTMAS

This headline writing seems to me an underrated art which deserves more recognition than it receives at present, to the extent that I am proposing to set up an award to reflect the skill and ingenuity displayed by its highly paid (probably deeply flawed) practitioners – the Pun of the Year award, which will be known as a POTY.

Sponsors and nominations are very welcome.