The promotion of Ed Balls will prove to be much more significant for politics than the spiking of Andy Coulson
Sometimes they gorge us. In the space of less than 24 hours, Alan Johnson was gone, Ed Balls replaced him, Tony Blair was recalled before the Iraq inquiry and Andy Coulson, the prime minister's premier propagandist, resigned.
So many turbulent comings and goings have been compressed into such a short space of time that we need to account for the quickened pace of the cycle by updating Harold Wilson's old aphorism. A day is a long time in politics.
One of my colleagues suggests that it is like being presented with a lovely large box of especially delicious chocolates. There is a dilemma about which to bite into first. As a final service to his master, the departing Number 10 spin doctor tried to nudge us away from chewing on the Coulson cluster. The announcement of his resignation was timed to coincide with the Blair recall and the fall-out from the Johnson departure, the hope being that those events would crowd his own resignation out of the headlines.
As an exercise in deflection this did not really work. Attempts to bury bad news rarely do. The Coulson resignation was bound to generate a lot of coverage. The media are obsessive about any tale involving themselves and, in any case, the News International phone-hacking scandal is a highly important story in its own right. On top of that, the Coulson Affair makes an issue of David Cameron's judgment.
There is not much mystery about why the former tabloid editor finally had to spike himself. That became pretty much inevitable from the day that the Guardian first revealed that the News of the World had made huge secret payments to some of the people whose voicemail had been hacked by the paper while it was in the charge of Mr Coulson. The newspaper's defence, which was also his defence, that the hacking was solely down to one "rogue operator", began to implode. As more and more people said they would sue, a procession of highly embarrassing court cases loomed. The spin doctor had become the story, which is invariably fatal in that trade. To avoid photographers, Mr Coulson was having to slip out of his home in the early hours of the morning under the cover of darkness.
The hacking scandal had been lapping at the doorstep of Number 10 for months. Now it threatened to come flooding down the hallway. On Monday, David Cameron yet again found himself having to make apologies for his director of communications when interviewed by the Today programme. Perhaps that was the clincher ? or one of them ? for Mr Cameron that it was time to cut his friend loose before the association did any more damage. The prime minister's media man is supposed to spin for the prime minister, not the other way round. Within 48 hours, during a conversation on Wednesday night, they had agreed that the director of communications would resign.
A bigger question is why David Cameron gave such a significant role in his circle to a tainted former editor in the first place. The explanation for this is that the prime minister is not always the smoothly confident personality that he projects in public, one of the ways in which he is indeed an heir to Tony Blair. Andy Coulson was recruited to Team Cameron in the summer of 2007. The date is important, because that was a time when David Cameron and George Osborne were feeling deeply rattled. They feared that Gordon Brown, then enjoying his brief honeymoon with the voters, would call and win an early election; the right wing of their party was noisily restive; their messages were not playing well in the media; relations with the Tory tabloids were very scratchy.
It is idiomatic of contemporary politics that the two of them concluded that the best remedy for their problems was to recruit a former tabloid editor, with Mr Osborne as Mr Coulson's most energetic sponsor even though the News of the World had done over the then shadow chancellor. In Andy Coulson, they believed they had found someone with an intimate feel for how to please the right-wing tabloids plus excellent connections with Rupert Murdoch's papers. At that aspect of the job ? and some others ? he was rather successful. The Sun was always likely to switch back to the Conservatives once Tony Blair had been replaced by Gordon Brown, but Mr Coulson lubricated the way. Still, the risk-reward ratio never looked good. We did not know then all that we know now about the industrial scale of the systematic phone hacking perpetrated by the News of the World, but we did know that Mr Coulson had had to resign as editor. People are asking: what checks did Messrs Cameron and Osborne make, what questions did they put to Mr Coulson before they made him their media supremo? My informed guess is that they really did not ask him many hard questions at all, so anxious were they to recruit him to Team Tory. But was it not obvious that the hacking scandal would continue to haunt him and would therefore stalk them too?
To anyone with any grasp of how politics and the media work, it was clear that this was very likely to happen. But there are two things you should never underestimate about politicians. One is a capacity for otherwise smart people completely to miss or ignore the obvious, especially when they are feeling rather desperate. Another is their ability to believe that they can always brazen out almost anything which is combined with a stubborn refusal to confront their own mistakes. By the time of the general election, it was absolutely evident that the hacking scandal was not going away. It was exploding. Once he had helped install David Cameron at Number 10, instead of joining him there as director of communications, Andy Coulson might have said that his job was done and he was moving on. But by then Mr Cameron had grown rather dependent on his spin meister and did not want to give his critics the satisfaction of being able to crow that they had been proved right. By postponing the grasping of the nettle, he has ended up being worst stung by it.
Among those saying that this raises "real questions" about David Cameron's judgment is Ed Miliband. He may be right, but it is also a misjudgment by the Labour leader to enter this fray. It is a sign of a weakness on his part to want to score quick tactical hits on the Tories. That sort of character attack is better left to the media and his juniors. He would be a more prime ministerial-looking figure if he held himself aloof.
Criticism of your opponent's judgment also invites people to ask whether your own judgment is so impeccable. Ed Miliband gave the job of shadow chancellor to Alan Johnson partly because he was an experienced pair of hands, regarded as an adroit and engaging media performer, but mainly because he appeared to be the one senior plausible candidate for this portfolio who was neither Ed Balls or Mrs Balls. As it turned out, not being someone else was insufficient qualification for the second most important job on the Labour frontbench. It would be unfair to blame Ed Miliband for failing to anticipate the turmoil in Alan Johnson's personal life. It is reasonable to remark that the wisdom of that appointment was in question even before we knew about that. As I observed here last week, Mr Johnson never sounded confident as shadow chancellor and had been looking particularly miserable in recent days.
Now Ed Balls, who has found it difficult to suppress a smirk, has the job he coveted and which he was originally denied when Ed Miliband put together his first shadow cabinet three months ago. It has been much remarked that the two Eds are both proteges of Gordon Brown and this, along with the appointment of Yvette Cooper as shadow home secretary and the elevation of Douglas Alexander to shadow foreign secretary, seals a Brownite ascendancy over the Labour party. The sons and daughters of Gordon do indeed look more completely in charge than ever they were when Mr Brown was prime minister.
That is true and yet liable to mislead about the personal relations at the top of the Labour party. The Brownites are riven with antagonisms every bit as intense, if not more so, as those that existed between them and the Blairites. Ed M and Ed B fell out long ago. One didn't give the job to the other in the first place because Ed M didn't trust Ed B and Ed B couldn't disguise his disdain for Ed M.
"Do you really want me in this job?" Mr Balls demanded when Mr Miliband offered the shadow chancellorship. Ed B was very angry that he wasn't given the role last autumn. But being made to wait a bit has greatly strengthened his clout, an enhancement of his stature that is not causing unalloyed pleasure among many of his colleagues.
The resignation of Andy Coulson is a blow to David Cameron, but it will pass. The waters will close over his spin doctor's head and the prime minister will soon find himself a new propagandist. I strongly suspect that the empowering of Ed Balls will ultimately prove to be the much more significant development of a very long 24 hours in British politics.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/23/andrew-rawnsley-coulson-johnson-balls
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