Andrew Whitaker: David Cameron's playing catch-up with public opinion

Published on Friday 8 July 2011 19:14

THE continuing fallout from David Cameron's close association and ongoing friendship with former News of the World editor Andy Coulson arguably represents the biggest crisis of the Tory leader's premiership and perhaps of his six years leading the party.

Serious questions are now being asked about Mr Cameron's judgment after claims that he ignored warnings about appointing Mr Coulson as Tory Party communications chief when the tabloid editor had resigned from the News of the World in 2007, following the jailing of the paper's royal editor and a private investigator over phone hacking.

Mr Cameron has taken full responsibility for appointing Mr Coulson in the first place, but the Prime Minister still looks very much like a man trying to play catch-up with public outrage over the phone-hacking scandal.

To begin with it was only yesterday that Mr Cameron finally conceded that the inquiry into the hacking scandal should be should be led by a judge - something Labour had been demanding for several days.

There's also Mr Cameron's admission that he's still friends with Mr Coulson, alongside claims that he ignored the advice of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger that the appointment would deliver more phone-hacking scandals and tarnish any government he might lead.

Mr Cameron also appeared to be floundering at Prime Minister's Questions this week, when he failed to back Labour leader Ed Miliband's call for News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks to resign over the scandal.

The Prime Minister's belated comments yesterday that he would have accepted Mrs Brooks's resignation made him look like a man on the back foot.

Mr Cameron has failed to keep up with the breath-taking speed with which this extraordinary story is developing. The perception is that he is behind the curve of public opinion in a way that his Labour predecessor Gordon Brown was in his failure to act decisively when the scandal about MPs' expenses first began to emerge at Westminster.

As scandals go, this is a particularly bad one with massive implications for the media and for the way politicians conduct themselves.

But it is not the most serious misdemeanour of recent political history. The row over the "sexing-up" of the Iraq War dossier that damaged Tony Blair's spell at Number 10 was worse. The Blair government never fully recovered from that 2003 scandal. Mr Cameron must hope that he can recover from the damage that has been wrought by misguided appointment of Coulson and his close friendship with Mrs Brooks.

In this early stage of his premiership, there is a possibility he can do so. Mr Cameron is not the only politician who has been guilty of trying to ingratiate himself with the Murdochs. Let's not forget that Mr Cameron was joined by Mr Miliband and Ed Balls at the News International summer party. And Mr Blair and Gordon Brown attempted to woo Rupert Murdoch with an ardour that now seems unseemly.Granted, Mr Cameron's friendships within News International are uncomfortably close compared with his political rivals. But sucking up to media moguls is not the exclusive preserve of the Conservatives.

The challenge facing Mr Cameron is that he must now distance himself completely from those friendships and transform a political culture that has seen British governments enthralled by an elderly Australian press baron.