United Kingdom: Prime minister’s judgment in question

Prime Minister David Cameron’s chief spin doctor has been “forced to quit,” said James Chapman in the Daily Mail. Andy Coulson resigned last week because of a rising tide of allegations that he allowed the illegal hacking of celebrities’ telephone messages when he was editor of the tabloid News of the World. Coulson left the paper in 2007 after one of its reporters, Clive Goodman, was jailed for hacking into the voice mail of hundreds of people, including members of the royal family. Coulson claimed at the time that he knew nothing of Goodman’s actions. But since then, former employees have come forward to say that phone hacking was widespread at the tabloid and condoned by top editors. In recent weeks, police have reopened an investigation, and a current executive at News of the World has been suspended. As Coulson said in his resignation statement, “When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it is time to move on.”

Coulson’s departure was entirely predictable, even inevitable, said The Economist. The scandal has “dogged him” for years, raising serious questions about the prime minister’s judgment for having appointed him in the first place. Many doubt that Cameron “really believed” that Coulson “could have been entirely oblivious of widespread phone hacking taking place under his nose.” The obvious conclusion, therefore, is that Cameron “was choosing to employ someone he knew to have done wrong.” This episode is “catastrophic” for the prime minister, said Simon Heffer in The Telegraph. Cameron’s “arrogance, lack of judgment, and contempt for decent values are all exposed at a stroke by Coulson’s scuttling off with his head held low.”

Even if there had been no hacking controversy, Coulson would have been an “unwise appointment,” said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail, “simply because he was editor of the News of the World for four years.” That tabloid is as lowbrow as they come. But it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and that’s why Coulson was tapped, despite his baggage, as Cameron’s spin doctor. After all, one of Cameron’s “main concerns” was to persuade Murdoch’s news media, which backed Labor “through thick and thin for more than a decade,” to switch to the Conservative Party. With Coulson, a longtime Murdoch man, at his side, Cameron could count on the loyalty of key newspapers and TV channels.

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This whole saga reveals “the ominously dominant position of Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire in our national life,” said The Independent in an editorial. The original hacking was barely investigated, perhaps because the Metropolitan Police were cowed by Murdoch or ordered off by higher-ups who feared him. Officers failed to question the editors at the News of the World or to inform thousands of people—including members of Parliament—that their private messages may have been hacked. “An iron triangle” consisting of the prime minister’s office, the Murdoch empire, and the police tried “to rubbish this investigation” and sweep wrongdoing under the carpet.” Coulson’s resignation “must be the start of accountability, not the end.”