Director of Government Communtications Andy Coulson leaves his house on September 9, 2010 in London, England. Former The News of The World editor, Mr Coulson is facing further criticism over allegations of illegal phone tapping during his time at the paper.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Half a decade ago, his Sunday tabloid routinely printed front-page headlines that would deeply embarrass actors, musicians, politicians and members of the Royal Family by revealing the most intimate details of their private lives, obtained by having reporters break into the voicemail messages on the celebrities' cellphones.
Now, in an apparent reversal of fortunes, that legacy has caught up with Andy Coulson, who announced his resignation Friday as chief media aide and right-hand man to British Prime Minister David Cameron after eight months on the job, acknowledging that investigations into the phone-tapping scandal had come too close to him.
The scandal, which dated back to his time as editor of the News of the World, a large-circulation tabloid owned by Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch, has cast a shadow over Mr. Cameron's Liberal-Conservative coalition government from the beginning.
In 2007, it cost Mr. Coulson his job, when the scandal led to his resignation from the paper, but he continues to deny that he had any knowledge of the hundreds of incidents of cellphone hacking that took place under his watch and led to the paper's most lurid and prominent scoops.
The big stories seemed, for a number of years, to have come straight from God's mouth into the News of the World's ear: A banner headline in 2006 reading "Chelsy Tears a Strip off Harry" revealed that Prince William had left a voicemail message on Prince Harry's cellphone imitating his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy berating him for having visited a lap-dancing club.
On Friday, as judicial inquiries into those headlines moved closer to his own former office, he abruptly resigned.
"Unfortunately, continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110 per cent needed in this role," he said in a statement yesterday afternoon. "I stand by what I've said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it's time to move on."
A court hearing into the phone-hacking scandal has recently shattered Mr. Coulson's claim that only a rogue Royal Family reporter and a private investigator used by the paper were aware of the password-bypassing technique widely used at the paper. While he has not been named in testimony, a number of reporters and editors, some of whom have told the press that Mr. Coulson directly ordered them to hack into cellphones, are due to take the stand in coming days.
But in a perfect illustration of the dark arts he had apparently mastered, Mr. Coulson waited to read the resignation statement, which friends said had been drafted two days earlier, until Friday afternoon when Britain's 24-hour news channels were filled with live images of former prime minister Tony Blair giving testimony to the Chilcot inquiry into the decision to invade Iraq.
That tactic only partially worked, as most broadcasters interrupted their coverage of the Iraq inquiry to devote themselves to Mr. Coulson's drama.
While Mr. Cameron was quick to issue a statement supporting Mr. Coulson Friday, arguing that his ex-aide "has been punished twice for the same offence," the tabloid scandal has tainted his government with two less than desirable associations.
The first, evident in yesterday's TV juxtapositions, is with Mr. Blair's Labour government. While Mr. Cameron had campaigned to draw a line under the spin-oriented, media-driven approach to high office that exemplified Mr. Blair's 10-year prime ministership - and has so far displayed a more mellow and disengaged approach to front-page headlines - the forceful tabloid presence of Mr. Coulson seemed a reminder of that era.
Indeed, Mr. Coulson had modelled his office after Alastair Campbell, the pugnacious press aide to Mr. Blair during the 1990s, who effectively circumvented the cabinet to run a "sofa government" from Mr. Blair's office. That technique, while annoying to ministers, has proven popular with leaders from both parties, and has been key to Mr. Cameron's strategy.
Friday night Mr. Campbell, writing on his blog, suggested that Mr. Coulson had overstepped the bounds of credibility.
"The News of the World story was just too toxic," he wrote. "I have said before that one of the reasons it keeps rumbling along is that no journalist I know can understand how an editor wouldn't know where big stories came from."
The second dangerous association is with Rupert Murdoch, who is making a controversial bid to buy total control of the British Sky Broadcasting enterprise, which controls the country's most-watched TV networks - a move that would give him a profound media oligarchy, as he already owns the Times and the Sun as well as the News of the World.
Mr. Cameron and his ministers will have to decide on the merits of that deal in weeks. Having a former high-profile Murdoch executive at the top of the Downing Street team does not help his image of impartiality; nor do reminders of the most sensational and ethnically questionable practices of Mr. Murdoch's journalism.
There were few outside of 10 Downing St. who seemed to lament Mr. Coulson's departure Friday night. Even loyal Conservatives and members of Mr. Cameron's coalition cabinet had come to resent the press aide's control over all messages coming from the government and his role in limiting access to Mr. Cameron to a small handful of core advisers.
"I think there was a real problem in the way in which Andy Coulson was controlling the Downing Street communications operation," Tim Montgomerie, editor of the blog ConservativeHome, told the Financial Times. "He was talking to hardly anybody. Now Cameron has the chance to put in place people who will rebuild relations with the centre-right press, the grassroots of the party and his backbench."
Doug Saunders