Its becoming increasingly clear that David Cameron’s decision to employ Andy Coulson was not just a matter of questionable judgement. Why would an incoming Prime Minister employ somebody in a senior position within No 10, knowing that they bring with them significant amounts of political baggage? The answer does not lie in the skills and expertise of Andy Coulson, but elsewhere in the form of the company that he keeps.
David Cameron’s links with senior figures within News International are well established, and have been described in the Daily Telegraph:
It was called the Chipping Norton set, an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the Prime Minister’s Oxfordshire constituency. Brooks and her husband, the former racing trainer Charlie Brooks, live in a house scarcely a mile from David and Samantha Cameron’s constituency home. The two couples meet frequently, and have continued to do so long after the phone hacking scandal became well known.
PR fixer Matthew Freud, married to Mr Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, is another member of this Chipping Norton set. When Mr Cameron bumped into Freud at Rebekah Brooks’s wedding two years ago, he and Mr Freud greeted each other with exuberant high-fives to signal their exclusive friendship.
The question we have to ask is whether David Cameron chose his friends because he thought they would be of use to him, or whether his friends within the Chipping Norton Set chose him because he could be useful to them? Who was using who? The question is rhetorical. We know how it works. It’s probable, that no explicit decisions where ever made, each is likely to have seen the benefit of implied and unspoken understandings. People who are intelligent and ambitious don’t need to state the obvious they just know how relationships can work for the benefit of all concerned.
So in the context of this set of relationships, the employment of Andy Coulson is not simply the employment of a random media relations expert who deserved a second chance following a mis-judgement of indeterminate magnitude. Andy Coulson was a Deputy Editor of the News of the World whilst Rebekah Wade/Brooks was its Editor, when she left he was promoted Editor. So when David Cameron appointed Andy Coulson to be Director of Communications to the Conservative Party in 2007, just months after he left the News of the World, he was not only appointing an ex-Editor who had resigned under a cloud, he was appointing an ex-subordinate of a very powerful and influential friend.
With this in mind and to return to the question posed above: why might the leader of the party that was then in opposition decide to appoint Andy Coulson as its Head of Communication? David Cameron would only have employed him if he were not viewed as damaged goods by his previous employer. Without good relations with News International the employment of Andy Coulson would simply not have made sense. Given David Cameron’s relationship with Brooks, he would have known that Coulson hadn’t blotted his copy book with News International, despite having failed to deal with the embryonic stage of the Phone Hacking Scandal. There were obviously no off the record conversations between Cameron and Brooks as to his unsuitability or rank incompetence. So we can presume that David Cameron and Brooks either never spoke to each other about the appointment of Andy Coulson, which is possible but unlikely, or that she only had good things to say about her former colleague.
But if Coulson was guilty of incompetence why would Brooks support his employment with the Conservative Party? The cynical amongst us might think that his appointment may have been encouraged by members of the Chipping Norton Set as a means of strengthening News Internationals influence on government and that Cameron might have viewed the relationship in a similar yet inverse fashion. Whilst there may not be any direct evidence for this having been expressed explicitly, the closeness of David Cameron to the News International aristocracy makes it difficult not to come to the conclusion that each will have seen his appointment as mutually beneficial.
Of course Rebekah Brooks would only ever have wanted this if her relationship with Coulson was still strong and her relationship with Coulson would only still be strong if he was not incompetent and if he was not incompetent what was he? It is probable that he was very loyal to his mentor and to the organisation for whom they both worked.
Which begs the question, was it really David Cameron who appointed Andy Coulsen?
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