He rose through the tabloid ranks to run the News of the World, then No 10's spin operation, before the phone hacking scandal landed him in jail. He tells Decca Aitkenhead what he has learnt.
Andy Coulson had to sit his youngest son down recently and hold a difficult conversation. The 52-year-old lives with his wife and three sons in an elegant Georgian house on the high street of a picturesque village in rural Kent; he runs his own successful consultancy business, his wife is training to be an acupuncturist. The family resembles Middle England at its most unremarkable.
But the youngest is 11 "and of course he's now entering the Google zone", so his father knew he had to tell his son something before the internet did: that six years ago he was sentenced to prison at the Old Bailey in one of the most sensational trials of the 21st century.
The former editor isn't accustomed to needing to break this news, for it was the biggest and best known story of his career. In 2007 he resigned as editor of the News of the World, one of the highest-circulation papers on the planet, after one of his senior reporters and a private investigator were jailed for hacking into the voicemail messages of royals and celebrities. Six months later, assured by Coulson that he'd had nothing to do with their crimes, David Cameron hired him to be communications director of the Conservative Party. On Cameron's election in 2010 Coulson entered Downing Street, officially his chief press secretary, unofficially the third most powerful man in the Tory ranks.
Yet the phone hacking story wouldn't go away. In December that year, evidence emerged that the private investigator had been employed by senior News of the World staff who reported directly to Coulson. Scenting blood, the press closed in, making Coulson's position untenable. "When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it's time to move on," he announced in January 2011, and resigned again.
Still it wouldn't go away. Over the following months reports of industrial-scale hacking under his editorship gripped the nation, prompting the closure of the News of the World and leading to multiple resignations and prosecutions of some of the most senior police officers and journalists in the country. Coulson was arrested and charged with conspiracy to intercept voicemails, Cameron publicly apologised for hiring him, and at the end of an eight-month trial in 2014 he was found guilty, sentenced to 18 months and taken in a prison van to HMP Belmarsh.
Since then he has not spoken to any newspaper. Even before his disgrace he almost never gave press interviews; I could find just one, way back in 2005. Before agreeing to meet me, he and I speak on the phone. He sounds so excruciatingly wary that at any moment I'm expecting him to get cold feet and cancel — right up until I knock on his front door.
The figure who greets me looks trimmer and fresher than he used to. He also seems surprisingly relaxed. Solicitous and friendly, he welcomes me into the spacious family home, its look best described as executive rustic. We sit by the Aga, fuss over his two big dogs, make small talk about Donald Trump and his wife pops her head in to say a smiley hello. No one looking would ever guess that the conversation we're about to have could be daunting for him.
I don't think anyone listening would ever guess, either, that he was responsible for headlines such as "Dannii's lesbian CCTV sex" or "Crouch Wag on coke". The dry, cautious, self-contained Coulson doesn't even seem like a journalist. He speaks in an economical, colourless register, not unlike a post-match footballer, and even when recounting some of the most dramatic or emotional moments of his life his capacity for understatement is quite something. Resigning from the News of the World "hurt". Being denied books while locked up for 23 hours a day was "irritating". What was it like for him to tell his son he'd been to prison? "That was not the best day of my life."
I wonder if this is all down to inhibition about speaking publicly, but he says he isn't feeling nervous. The following day, though, he gets in touch with a whole page of quasi-legalistic notes to clarify various points, which suggests he'd spent the night replaying everything he'd said in his head. He really didn't need to worry that he'd been loose-lipped. When my tape is typed up, much of what he said reads less like a magazine article than the transcript of an interview under caution. He is, I'm reminded, more familiar with being interviewed by the police.
Coulson first found out he was about to be arrested while sitting at his kitchen table with his wife, Eloise, "when I read it in The Guardian". He doesn't want to talk about his trial — "There was enough coverage of that at the time" — and to this day he maintains his innocence of any involvement in phone hacking. Instead we talk a lot about prison.
Coulson arrived at Belmarsh expecting to stay only a few days before being dispersed to a category D jail. In the event he was kept there in notoriously high-security conditions for two months, only transferring to the category D Hollesley Bay for the last ten weeks of his incarceration, before being released to serve the remainder on electronic tag. "I was locked up for at least 18 hours most days and some days 23. It was a miserable place." Was he shocked by the conditions he found there? "I was shocked by the dysfunctionality, yeah. Nothing worked there — other than keeping the inmates in." He slept on a 2in-thick rubber mattress, sharing a cell with two other men.
He says that when a new prisoner arrives at Belmarsh, the house block officer announces the new arrival, and says "who they are and what they're about". When he arrived, "the first thing I did was that I got a mop and bucket and cleaned the cell. I did it actually because my cell was filthy. It'd been burnt out by previous occupants, it needed cleaning. But that was a good way, also, of saying that I'm the same as the rest of them, right?"
Did it work? "Well, I got on, as I like to try and do with anyone. I got on pretty well with everyone." I ask if he adopted prison slang. "Er …" He hesitates, then chuckles. " 'Living the dream.' It's kind of a prisoner's greeting. 'Morning, how are you?' 'Ah, I'm good. Living the dream.' "
One of his mental coping strategies was to try to see prison through a journalistic lens. "So you go into observation mode." Mostly, though, "the way I approached it is: I'm here. Not to get too philosophical about it, but I'm breathing, I'm thinking, and this is another place to breathe and think. Not a particularly pleasant one, but I'll get on and get through it."
At the time the government had imposed restrictions on books in prison, so Coulson watched "more daytime television than is healthy for any human being". He tried to occupy his mind by devising a prison TV channel that inmates could earn credits by watching, instead of "wholly inappropriate, in my view, really violent kind of 18-rated films. Let's put on something else that's a bit more bloody hopeful and a bit more useful. Let's have some positive programming. Not all happy-clappy, but stuff that's just kind of thoughtful." He seriously drew up plans for morally improving television schedules? He smiles bashfully. "Yeah, bonkers really. But, for example, there's no literacy programming. That's not beyond the wit of man, is it?" The idea "got absolutely nowhere, obviously. But I got through quite a lot of time just sort of planning it."
Nowadays a lot of inmates spend most of their time on smartphones smuggled in. Was he tempted to get his hands on one? "God no." Why not? "Because it's illegal!" We both laugh, the irony of Coulson committing a mobile phone crime not lost on either of us.
He was offered one in Belmarsh, though, and an inmate made another interesting offer. "One of the longer-termers pulled me to one side and he said, 'Look, you'll keep being put to the bottom of the pile to get to an open prison. Unless, you know, I could sort that out for you. You send me a bank transfer and suddenly you'll be in a van to an open prison.' " Did Coulson believe that was in his gift? "Who knows? I doubt it. But I was very clear: no, thank you."
The majority of prison violence is "debt related", he says, and he witnessed several incidents but none directed at him. "One of the most annoying things that happened at Belmarsh was an untrue story in the press that I'd been attacked." He volunteers this in his usual dispassionate tone, but his expression betrays a rare glimpse of pain. "It bothered me because I knew that Eloise would have read it — and my mum would have read it. It would have been upsetting for them."
The only distress he makes no attempt to conceal is bitter regret that his two elder sons, then 14 and 12, came to see him in Belmarsh. Coulson's plan had been to wait until they could see him at a category D prison — an altogether less traumatic environment — but after he was told he would serve his full sentence at Belmarsh he allowed them to come. When his transfer finally came just a fortnight after his sons' visit, the relief was soured by undying regret at having not delayed their visit by a few more weeks.
From his account I assume that another coping strategy was total compliance. "No, I did challenge. In Belmarsh I would always ask the question, 'Why am I still here?' My solicitors were told, 'Tell him to stop complaining because he's going to spend the rest of his sentence here.' I don't know why, but I kept being put at the bottom of the pile." It's pretty obvious he thinks the motive was punitive and I'm about to ask why he won't just say so when he breaks off, looking uneasy. "I'm very aware this all sounds a bit 'woe is me'."
Woe is me, according to Coulson, are "the three most useless words". Because people would think it's a bit rich for him to feel sorry for himself? "No, I can't do anything about what other people think about me any more. I learnt that a long time ago. I don't have any control over it." It's out of self-preservation that he prohibits self-pity? "It's absolutely about me."
Having been the populist editor of a right-wing tabloid, I'm curious to know if the reality of prison made him reappraise his old editorial line of bang-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key. "Er, I think it was a little more sophisticated than that. But yeah, absolutely it was a paper of law and order. And yeah, the irony was not lost on me. I mean, honestly, how much of my time as a newspaper editor did I think about the impact prison has on people's lives? Not much. Can I say honestly, hand on heart, that I was as thoughtful about prison before I ended up in one? Of course I wasn't."
Had one of his columnists written about jail being a "holiday camp", he admits he would have cheerfully published it. Would it have been true? "Absolutely not." A high-profile inmate like himself sentenced to 18 months but released after five would, he agrees, have provoked an outraged editorial. Now he thinks "there are far too many people inside". He met prisoners he believed innocent — "and also a whole bunch of people who might not be innocent but who didn't need to be in prison. It doesn't work for the prisoner, doesn't work for society, doesn't work for politicians. It's not a good use of public money. On every level it doesn't work."
He thinks he would now make "a bloody useless red-top editor", no longer capable of summoning inexhaustible outrage or casting black-and-white judgments. Wouldn't that, I suggest, make him a better one? He smiles wanly. "I was the editor of a tabloid newspaper. Did we make judgments about people? Yes. Were some of those judgments wrong? Yes. Do I regret some of the stories we ran, some of the judgments I made? Absolutely. With the benefit of hindsight, I got excited about all sorts of things I now wonder why I got excited about."
Coulson was only 16 when he fell in love with newspapers. Born in Basildon to working-class parents who bought their council house, he "owned enough Ford Fiestas" to qualify as a proper Essex boy. "And probably enough pairs of white socks." Work experience on his local paper aged 16 fired a burning ambition for Fleet Street, and by 20 he was a showbusiness reporter on The Sun, living the dream for real. In 2000 he married Eloise and became deputy editor of the News of the World, The Sun's Sunday sister paper, published by News International, as it was then called, the parent company of The Sunday Times. Three years later, still only 35, he was made editor.
"There's something called 'editoritis'," he volunteers. "The main symptom is that you believe yourself to be the centre of the world. That everything else revolves around you. And I definitely suffered from editoritis."
When I ask him about his paper's culture, though, he gets defensive. "Ruthless I'll accept, but not heartless." The paper did a lot wrong, "but a lot of good too". He was angry that it was closed down, defends his former staff — "mostly brilliant, decent and professional men and women who did absolutely nothing wrong" — and denies that any bullying went on in the office. An employment tribunal did find Coulson guilty of bullying a reporter, I point out. "I will dispute it for ever. I wasn't a bully." But his job every week was to print stories likely to destroy people's lives. The victims would often call and plead with him not to publish. How could anyone take those calls, week after week, unless they got a kick out of it? "That bit of the job, the power over someone's life — no, I didn't enjoy it."
Can that really be true? I start to wonder whether the emotional detachment he deployed to survive prison might have first been perfected on Fleet Street. Perhaps he could cope when his own life fell apart because he had honed indifference to the ruin of so many others.
If Coulson could turn back time, wave a magic wand and delete the whole chapter of jail, would any bit of him hesitate to? I'm half expecting him to say I must be mad, but he pauses for a moment before saying softly: "Yeah. Because I'm a better husband. I'm a better father. I'm a better friend. And definitely a better adviser, professionally, as a result of what happened to me. I'm not at all glad it happened and I wish it hadn't, but I think it definitely causes you to look hard at your life. That's the bit of prison that I suppose does work. I spent more time thinking about what I wanted my life to be after prison than I'd ever spent thinking about what my life was before prison. And I'm very clear now: we don't have an awful lot of time — and you've got to make the most of it. And I want to make the most of it for my kids and for my family and Eloise." Until now I'd wondered how his youngest son, five years old at the time of the conviction, could have grown up unaware of what had happened. Coulson must have exercised the same self-contained discipline I observe during this interview every single day for the past six years. "I was very clear that thereafter I was going to work as hard as I possibly can to be as positive an individual as I can be, and to build a business that I enjoy enormously."
Coulson now advises chief executives on strategy and PR; his website sells him as a "poacher turned gamekeeper — turned game". Did he never doubt that his own crisis could be rebranded from a liability to an asset? "Well, I didn't exactly have much choice." Coulson capitalised on it again when the country went into lockdown earlier this year by launching a podcast called Crisis What Crisis? Each guest has experienced their own crisis, from the economist Vicky Pryce's imprisonment to Martha Lane Fox's near-fatal car crash and life-changing injuries. Listening to the podcasts, I'm frustrated he won't apply to his own life the same psychologically insightful curiosity with which he probes his guests.
"But it's all too easy, isn't it, looking back in the rear-view mirror?" There were several Sliding Doors moments in his past, for example, when had he chosen a different path disaster might have been averted. After leaving the News of the World he was offered the editorship of a tabloid in New York. On the very same day, in the same hotel, "I met with the newspaper upstairs, then went into the bar downstairs and had a chat with George [Osborne]" about joining the Tories. Had he chosen New York and not a high-profile political position things might have turned out differently. "I just find that exercise is very dangerous. It's the same pot as the 'what if' and the 'why me' and all that stuff. It's very, very dangerous, because you take yourself backwards and never forwards."
Every ex-con faces all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles, from ineligibility for home contents insurance to needing a special visa to enter America. Money was clearly also a worry, as the family home in London had to be sold to release equity to live on. Coulson brushes off these problems lightly, but I'm pretty sure re-entry was bumpier than he likes to let on. He's done a lot of therapy and his bond with the friends who stood by him has deepened immeasurably; as for those who "ran away, you shouldn't get too angry". Anyone who's ever been abandoned in a crisis will know that's a lot easier said than done.
He has managed it with Cameron, though. Coulson was "livid" with the former PM for apologising to the country for hiring him before he'd even been found guilty. Yet the pair had lunch earlier this year and Coulson still counts him as a friend. Cameron used to describe him as a "genius" at government comms and he's been shouting at the telly a lot during Covid press conferences.
"If I were there in Downing Street I would be saying that trust in the situation is absolutely everything. To get the trust you've got to be competent. Stop overpromising, stop telling people there's going to be some magical solution. There isn't going to be. Be straight with people about how difficult it is.
"Funnily enough," he adds, "this whole lockdown comms is quite similar to prison comms. When you're in prison leadership is really important and consistency is really important. Mess with people's rights to see their families at your peril. When I saw real frustration with the system from other inmates, it was around that sense of 'Treat us all the same and show us with clarity what it is we're supposed to be doing on a day-to-day basis. Where am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to be doing today?' People want competence and leadership."
I ask if there were any moments of genuine laughter or hilarity in jail. He pauses. "The reason I hesitate is, do I want people to think I was laughing my way through prison? No, I bloody don't. And no I bloody wasn't. But were there moments when I laughed." Tell me one, I say.
"On the first night in prison I'm queueing up for a plate of food and the bloke behind the servery gives me an extra potato. He said, 'I'm giving you that because I used to read the News of the World. I used to love that paper.' And I thought to myself, this is literally the first benefit I have had from having been the editor of the News of the World for a number of years. Who knew it would be an extra potato from the servery at Belmarsh?"
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London