Coulson’s time inside

Andy Coulson’s rise and fall was meteoric. Born to workingclass parents in Basildon, he started out in newspapers aged 16. By 20, he was reporting for The Sun; at 35, he was editing the News of the World. He resigned over the phone hacking scandal in 2007, but was made David Cameron’s director of communications six months later. Then, as the hacking revelations intensified, it all unravelled. He quit Downing Street in 2011 and, three years later, was sentenced to 18 months after being found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voicemails. Prison, he told Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times, was a “miserable place... I was locked up for at least 18 hours most days and some days 23”. He tried to fit in; he used the slang (“‘How are you?’ ‘Ah, I’m good. Living the dream.’”), but mostly “the way I approached it is: I’m here. 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.” He passed the time by drawing up “bonkers” plans to improve prison TV, and watching “more daytime television than is healthy for any human being”. The experience led him to radically rethink the tough views on law and order he’d espoused as a tabloid editor. “The irony was not lost on me.” Prison, he says, “doesn’t work... It doesn’t work for the prisoner, doesn’t work for society... It’s not a good use of public money.” Yet Coulson

– who was freed after five months – wouldn’t necessarily wave a wand and delete the whole chapter if he could. “I’m not at all glad it happened,” he says, “but I think it definitely causes you to look hard at your life. That’s the bit of prison that I suppose does work.”