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That an ambitious politician such as Cameron would take a risk on buying damaged goods—or on giving Coulson "a second chance" as the normally fluent Prime Minister repeated robotically at the press conference—says a great deal about the sway of the tabloid press over British political life. The influence of Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of the two biggest, the Sun and the News of the World, has been profound, not least because successive political leaders believed his approbation could make them and his opposition might break them. In fact Tony Blair's success also owed much to his abilities as a communicator, to timing and to a certain amount of dumb luck, but even with three electoral victories in the bag, to the moment he left Downing Street and beyond, he was wooing Murdoch. In his first six years in office he was assisted in this endeavor by Alastair Campbell, like Coulson a former tabloid journalist.
Cameron saw in Coulson his very own Alastair Campbell, someone who could communicate with the tabloids because he was of the tabloid world. Campbell, who resigned in 2003 after a judicial inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of government weapons expert David Kelly, left a mixed legacy; intimately involved in pushing a (now unraveled) case for the Iraq War, his relations with the media turned to "poison," as he admits. Coulson's dealings with parliamentary correspondents were cordial by comparison (though he did once ring me up late at night to complain about a punning headline describing his posh boss as A CLASS ACT; class was no longer an issue for British voters, he growled.) But he has left Cameron with far greater problems than any animus from the press. Indeed, Coulson's arrest is seen in some circles as toxic for Cameron as the Iraq War proved for Blair.
Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/07/08/fallout-of-u-k-hacking-scandal-reaches-nexus-of-political-and-media-power/#ixzz1RknTs3nD
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