James O'Brien

In April 2023 the IMF adjusted its forecast for the British economy upwards. In terms of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it would still be the worst performing in the G7 group of developed nations but not by as big a margin as it had forecast in January. In March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), another intergovernmental organisation founded to stimulate economic progress and international trade, found that the UK would have the second worst performing economy in the whole of the G20. Only Russia, heavily sanctioned and at war in Ukraine, was forecast to perform worse. Frighteningly, the IMF actually had Russia performing better than the UK in the same period. Either way, the picture is obviously bleak and the only way to pretend otherwise is to pretend that these organisations are somehow deliberately misrepresenting data to embarrass the United Kingdom. It is remarkable how much credence these paranoid fantasies, and that’s being generous, are still given.

ON 21 NOVEMBER 2014, Andy Coulson was released from prison after serving barely a quarter of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to intercept voicemails – or ‘phone hacking’ as it is colloquially known. Coulson’s crimes were committed when he was editor of Rupert Murdoch’s first UK newspaper acquisition, the News of the World. He resigned from that post in January 2007 shortly before the paper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, became the first of several Murdoch journalists to be jailed for phone hacking. Just six months after that, in July, Coulson became the Conservative Party’s director of communications, and when David Cameron became prime minister in May 2010, Coulson became director of communications for the UK government. On the eve of Cameron’s Tory conference speech in October 2009, Coulson’s former lover, Rebekah Brooks (née Wade) – acquitted co-defendant in the phone-hacking trial, boss at Murdoch’s News International, and recently married to an Old Etonian friend of Cameron’s – texted the Tory leader: ‘I am so rooting for you tomorrow and not just as a personal friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together!’

Coulson resigned from Cameron’s government in January 2011 as the phone-hacking scandal gathered pace. It did so almost entirely due to the tireless journalism of the Guardian’s Nick Davies and the advocacy of the Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. Unlike the New York Times, most of the UK media and the entire Conservative government remained ambivalent, cowed or downright hostile toward the story until Davies reported that the News of the World had illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family, allegedly interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance.

At his trial in 2014, Mr Justice Saunders told the court that the News of the World’s initial failure to tell police that their journalists had ‘hacked’ the voicemail of Milly Dowler – later found to have been murdered – came from a desire to ‘take credit for finding her’ and sell newspapers. When he described that delay as ‘unforgivable’, he was being somewhat optimistic. In March 2017, the public relations firm that Coulson set up after leaving prison, Coulson Chappell, was awarded a contract to enhance the reputations of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. The Guardian’s media columnist Roy Greenslade wrote at the time: ‘His main brief is thought to be to promote the papers as truthful and authoritative.’