Although it could be said that knives were not overtly out for Andy Coulson last night, there was a definite intentional rattling of the cutlery drawer to be heard in up and down Whitehall.
Several lobby correspondents had earlier taken David Cameron’s subtle repositioning over his support for his communications chief as their cue to check whether it was Downing Street who had first mentioned Coulson’s earlier resignation offer. But when King Rat Nick Clegg issued his own statement distancing himself with a statement that it was “totally legitimate” for the DPP to review evidence of phone-hacking allegations at News of the World then the former editor assumed the characteristics of dead man spinning.
The Guardian has also reported how News Corporation's defence that phone hacking at the NoW was the work of a single "rogue reporter" was on the verge of collapse after Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective at the centre of the case, said the paper's head of news commissioned him to access voicemail messages.
Mulcaire reportedly supplied a statement to the high court yesterday afternoon confirming that Ian Edmondson, the paper's assistant editor asked him to hack into voicemail messages left on a mobile phone belonging to a football agent. The admission by Mulcaire, whose legal fees are believed to be met by News of the World publisher, News Group (part of the Murdoch's media empire) contradicts the paper's repeated claim that only a single journalist – the former royal editor Clive Goodman – knew about his activities.
Tory bloggers give Coulson less than a month in post before he is "reassigned" to more important work in the regions.
1 Comments:
He's gone.
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