Cameron is on the run again

Today David Cameron is in the house for the Queen’s Speech. He’ll be hoping that the relaunched coalition and their agenda for Britain will be grabbing the headlines this week.

He’s unlikely to get his wish.

Tomorrow Andy Coulson is at Leveson. Coulson has already shown that he is quite willing to quarrel with his former bosses of he feels he has been wronged. He has yet to speak publicly about the circumstances of his departure from Number 10. Tomorrow he will have to. And remember Cameron said he would be judged on Coulson’s appointment. He may rue that tomorrow.

Yet it’s not Coulson’s Leveson evidence that will be giving Cameron and his team sleepless nights, because on Friday there’s worse to come – Rebekah Brooks is coming. And she has text messages from the PM to share. If – as expected – they portray an uncomfortably close relationship between Brooks and Cameron, then the pressure will mount on Cameron. So far few of these personal messages have found their way into the public domain, but we got an inkling in the Times today(£):

“The gist of the message was, ‘Sorry I couldn’t have been as loyal to you as you have been to me, but Ed Miliband had me on the run’.”

This brings us back to what question has always been – “What did Cameron know?”. Passing an apologetic message to a friend is one thing, but if at any point Cameron promised that she would be looked after (of which there is no suggestion yet) that would be an entirely different matter.

But what we know already plainly suggests a deeply unhealthy convergence between the media, politicians and the police. If as alleged Cameron really did force the Met to review the Milly Dowler case in May 2011 at the behest of Brooks, then it calls into question how involved News International were in government policy.

Perhaps the truest words spoken on the matter are attributed – perhaps surprisingly – to Oliver Letwin. The Tory grandee is quoted in The Times today saying:

“All of us should have said, ‘We’ll have nothing to do with them and we’ll only meet them when we absolutely have to’. But the problem with that is if the other guy is doing it… it’s an arms race.”

He’s right. It was an arms race. A race to the bottom, and one that Ed Miliband – admittedly in the most extreme of circumstances – called time on. As Cameron appears to have admitted, Miliband had him on the run. That’s how it felt at the time – each day the PM being forced to concede more and more, until he made a huge effort to brazen out the phone hacking backlash in the hope that he could end it once and for all.

But he hasn’t. It’s back.

And Cameron is on the run again.