Andy Coulson must be scared. Not of the Guardian, which to date has failed to root him out of his job in Downing Street. And not of David Cameron, who shows no inclination to sack him. No, Coulson must be scared that his old boss Rupert Murdoch will pull the rug out from underneath him.
Murdoch wants, very much, to buy the whole of BSkyB so that he can move a big step closer to monopoly control of the British media market, and Coulson, almost accidentally, is getting in the way.
Any day now, Murdoch could pick up the phone in New York and ask Cameron (instruct him?) to ditch his most senior media adviser. No doubt News Corp would offer the former News of the World editor a nice job in compensation, but it would be the end of Coulson’s promising career as the smarter, slicker version of Alastair Campbell.
He is an embarrassment to the old man because the never-ending scandal of phone hacking keeps reminding us just how depraved and sinister the Murdoch empire can be. And this is happening at a moment when Murdoch wants us all to think of him as an inspiring business genius, a victim of Establishment snobbery and the man who just gives viewers what they want.
Murdoch employees illegally hacked the voicemails of the future king of this country, as well as dozens or more likely hundreds of other people very prominent in our public life. Reported targets include Cabinet ministers, a celebrity agent, a top sports official, a supermodel and at least one senior police officer — not to mention, perhaps most chillingly, ordinary members of the public who are victims of crime.
And as the revelations tumble out and the lawsuits against Murdoch’s company stack up, something even more significant is happening. People are talking more and more about his extraordinary power, and the fear he can spread.
That was the most potent message to come out of Peter Oborne’s Dispatches programme on the scandal last week. There were complaints afterwards that the key new witness casting doubt on Coulson’s I-knew-nothing defence was anonymous, but they missed the point: as Oborne made clear, the systematic need for anonymity provided eloquent proof of how frightened people are. Grassing on the Murdoch empire looks uncomfortably similar to grassing on the IRA.
Tom Watson MP, in a remarkable speech about phone-hacking to the Commons last month, sent the same message: “The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators; they are untouchable. They laugh at the law; they sneer at parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it.”
And have a look at the story of Michael Wolff, who had the nerve to write a critical biography of Murdoch. We probably wouldn’t have read that if it were not for phone-hacking.
Right now, when Murdoch has all his other ducks in a row for the total takeover of BSkyB — the Tories owe him for his papers’ election support; Ofcom is being neutered; the BBC is being kicked from pillar to post — he emphatically does not want to be making headlines as the monstrous bogey man of British public life.
So one day soon he may decide that Coulson, in principle a terrific Murdoch asset at the heart of British government, is in fact a liability. He may calculate that if Coulson went, the heat would go out of the phone-hacking scandal and those nasty headlines about ruthless, bully-boy News International would fade away.
And if that day comes, does anyone doubt that one phone call to Number 10 would settle the matter?
