David Cameron’s ex-media chief Andy Coulson told Britain’s press ethics inquiry Thursday that he had assured the future prime minister he knew nothing about phone hacking at the News of the World.
Coulson, 43, resigned as editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid in January 2007 after the paper’s royal reporter and a private investigator were jailed for phone hacking. He denied any knowledge of the practice.
He told the Leveson inquiry that George Osborne, the Conservative who is now Britain’s finance minister, approached him in May of the same year about being the then opposition party’s director of communications.
“Certainly he approached me with a view that I could be a positive asset,” Coulson told the inquiry.
He denied suggestions by counsel to the inquiry Robert Jay that his job at the News of the World was the “elephant in the room” during the conversation with Osborne.
“I don’t remember that being a specific conversation at that point. There may well have been a conversation about the fact that I worked on the News of the World and maybe we discussed some individuals in that regard,” he said.
When he took the job in a conversation with Cameron, he said he was “able to repeat what I had said publicly — that I knew nothing about the Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire case in terms of what they did.”
Goodman was the jailed royal reporter and Mulcaire was the private eye.
