ON 21 NOVEMBER 2014, Andy Coulson was released from prison after serving barely a quarter of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to intercept voicemails – or ‘phone hacking’ as it is colloquially known. Coulson’s crimes were committed when he was editor of Rupert Murdoch’s first UK newspaper acquisition, the News of the World. He resigned from that post in January 2007 shortly before the paper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, became the first of several Murdoch journalists to be jailed for phone hacking. Just six months after that, in July, Coulson became the Conservative Party’s director of communications, and when David Cameron became prime minister in May 2010, Coulson became director of communications for the UK government. On the eve of Cameron’s Tory conference speech in October 2009, Coulson’s former lover, Rebekah Brooks (née Wade) – acquitted co-defendant in the phone-hacking trial, boss at Murdoch’s News International, and recently married to an Old Etonian friend of Cameron’s – texted the Tory leader: ‘I am so rooting for you tomorrow and not just as a personal friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together!’
Coulson resigned from Cameron’s government in January 2011 as the phone-hacking scandal gathered pace. It did so almost entirely due to the tireless journalism of the Guardian’s Nick Davies and the advocacy of the Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. Unlike the New York Times, most of the UK media and the entire Conservative government remained ambivalent, cowed or downright hostile toward the story until Davies reported that the News of the World had illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family, allegedly interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance.