Now Mr Lewis, who represents several phone hacking victims, has questioned whether Mr Osborne?s championing of Mr Coulson was in any way linked to the News of the World?s coverage of claims made by Miss Rowe in 2005.
She alleged that Mr Osborne took cocaine when he attended parties at her home in the early 1990s, which Mr Osborne has always denied.
Mr Lewis has suggested that the News of the World gave Mr Osborne ?the benefit of the doubt? in an editorial that stopped short of calling for him to be barred from high office. In its leader column the newspaper pointed out that Mr Osborne was ?a young man when he found himself caught up in this murky world? and said it would be up to the public to judge him at election time, rather than making an outright call for him to step down. Mr Lewis said: ?The editorial could have gone completely the other way. It could have said that whilst we don?t believe Mr Osborne took drugs he showed a serious error of judgment being at a flat where drugs were taken, therefore he is not the right person to be at the heart of politics.
?The editor at the time was Andy Coulson, which is worth remembering because of the future relationship that we have between the Conservative party, the Prime Minister and Andy Coulson.?
Mr Lewis was speaking after Miss Rowe, who recently found out she was a victim of phone hacking by the News of the World, repeated her allegations about the Chancellor taking drugs.
A spokesman for Mr Osborne dismissed any suggestion that he owed anything to Mr Coulson and said of the drugs claims: ?These are old allegations that were widely reported and denied years ago. There is nothing new.? Mr Osborne has admitted in the past that he first met Miss Rowe in 1993, when he was introduced to her by her boyfriend William Sinclair, one of his dining companions in the Bullingdon Club during his days at Oxford University.
Mr Osborne, who was a bachelor at the time, was photographed with his arm around Miss Rowe in 1994 behind a table dusted with a white powder that Miss Rowe claims was cocaine.
At the time the picture was taken she was running an escort agency called Black Beauties, and charged clients a minimum of �350 for sadomasochistic sex.
Mr Coulson, who was hired by David Cameron just months after he quit the News of the World because of the phone hacking scandal, resigned from his Downing Street job in January following a series of further disclosures about the conduct of News of the World journalists.
He was arrested in July to be questioned about the illegal interception of voicemails and improper payments to police officers. He remains on bail.
Mr Coulson resigned from the paper in January 2007 on the day Clive Goodman, the newspaper?s royal editor, was jailed for hacking the phones of members of the Royal household. He began working for David Cameron six months later.
In July Mrs Brooks told MPs: ?It was George Osborne, the Chancellor?s, idea that when Andy Coulson left the News of the World they should start �discussions with him on whether he [would] be the appropriate person to go into Tory HQ.?
There were also claims that Mr Osborne had gone for dinner with Mr Coulson shortly after his resignation to sound him out about the job, telling him the Tories were looking for a ?heavyweight media operator? to direct press strategy.
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