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Prime Minister David Cameron spoke Monday in London on public services reform, but faced questions on the hacking scandal.
LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron is usually the nimblest of politicians, radiating self-assurance and blessed with an almost Reaganesque ability to deflect criticism. But as the phone hacking scandal spreads, Mr. Cameron has been placed in the unaccustomed position of appearing vulnerable and behind the curve.
He has been maneuvered into embarrassing U-turns nearly every step of the way, and on Tuesday performed the latest one: suddenly joining the opposition Labour Party, his bitterest foes, in calling for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to withdraw its $12 billion bid to buy British Sky Broadcasting, known also as BSkyB.
Mr. Cameron’s opponents in turn have seized on the chance to inflict damage on the once-unassailable prime minister. The scandal has given new life to the Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, and there are signs, too, of cracks in the governing coalition between the Conservatives and their until-now toothless Liberal Democrat partners. The Liberal Democrat leader, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, on Monday asserted a new independence by heaping moral outrage on Mr. Murdoch and urging him to rescind his BSkyB bid — a full day before Mr. Cameron would do the same.
But the prime minister’s problems go deeper than failing to read the political signs as quickly as other parties. More seriously, his critics say, the affair raises questions about Mr. Cameron’s character and judgment in cultivating multiple ties to News International, Mr. Murdoch’s British subsidiary, which helped put him in office but which is currently about as politically popular as a basket of snakes at a summer picnic.
Mr. Cameron is especially on the defensive about his relationship with his former chief spokesman, Andy Coulson, whom he hired in 2007, soon after Mr. Coulson resigned as the News of the World editor after the initial phone-hacking revelations. Recent disclosures indicate that Mr. Cameron was repeatedly warned not to bring Mr. Coulson with him to Downing Street last year, but did so anyway.
“Unless the prime minister can explain what happened with Mr. Coulson and apologize for this terrible error of judgment in employing him, his reputation and that of the government will be permanently tarnished,” Mr. Miliband said on Monday in the House of Commons.
Mr. Coulson, who gave Mr. Cameron a useful link to the tabloid news world and an invaluable connection to the Murdoch empire, had the full support of the prime minister until last week, when he was arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and paying the police for information and documents while editor of The News of the World.
Last Wednesday, Mr. Cameron called Mr. Coulson his friend and said that Mr. Coulson had always assured him he had done nothing wrong. But this Monday, he said: “If it turned out that those assurances were untrue, if I had been lied to, I would be incredibly angry.”
It turned out he had deflected numerous warnings about Mr. Coulson, from both allies and opponents. These went beyond the initial flurry of opprobrium that greeted Mr. Cameron’s initial decision to hire someone so close to an unfolding scandal.
In February 2010, the deputy editor of The Guardian, Ian Katz, said he telephoned Steve Hilton, Mr. Cameron’s director of strategy, with some worrisome information. According to The Guardian’s reporting, Mr. Katz said, Mr. Coulson and The News of the World had uncomfortably close connections to a corrupt private investigator with a criminal record named Jonathan Rees.
Mr. Katz told Mr. Hilton that the paper could not yet print every detail, because the matter was still in court, but enumerated a number of nasty disclosures that would eventually emerge. And indeed they did.
Mr. Rees, who had earlier been imprisoned for conspiring to plant cocaine on a woman, was rehired after his release as an 150,000-pounds-a-year investigator by The News of the World, edited at the time by Mr. Coulson, The Guardian reported. And he was to be tried as a suspect in an even worse crime: conspiring in the murder of his former business partner, who was chopped to death with an ax in a pub parking lot in 1987. (The trial fell apart this spring, charges were dismissed, and Mr. Rees’s location is unknown.)
Mr. Coulson had to pass through numerous layers of vetting before coming to Downing Street, and none found any criminal connections. On Monday, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office told The Guardian that “the prime minister has said that he was not given specific information” about Mr. Katz’s warnings.
