Big questions remain over Andy Coulson. Here’s one of them

When in doubt, favour the cock-up theory over the conspiracy. People can be clever and well organised, but rarely that clever and well organised. In a busy and occasionally frenetic world it is difficult to pull off grand deceptions in plain sight. It is getting harder to do so all the time. And yet: when the publicly offered explanation for a series of events stretches credulity visions of conspiracies can be hard to suppress.

So it is with the mysterious and perhaps already half-forgotten question of the inadequate security vetting of Andy Coulson in his role as director of communications at No 10 between May 2010 and January 2011. As you may (or may not) recall, it emerged after Coulson’s resignation and the subsequent debate in the wake of the Milly Dowler phone hacking revelations that the prime minister’s chief spokesman, unlike almost all his predecessors (and also unlike his successors) had not undergone the highest level of security clearance – “developed vetting”. Strange.

An explanation for this has emerged, first in this thorough piece by Ian Katz for The Guardian three years ago, and again last week and in further detail in a Robert Peston blog – one that is still 100% findable via Google. The official story remains more or less the same: the Downing Street permanent secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, felt that too many special advisers (ie non civil servants) were gaining access to classified information. There were also, it has been suggested, worrying cost implications to the widespread developed vetting of these advisers.

And so it was decided that Andy Coulson would not have to undergo the highest security clearance, and would therefore not have access to certain sensitive information. As far as his personal life and career were concerned some stones would be left unturned.

But by November 2010, it later emerged, that decision concerning Coulson had been changed. It was just not practical. Coulson was clearly working extremely closely with the prime minister, including on matters of national security. And he was indeed getting to see highly sensitive material. So a developed vetting process was finally begun which had not been completed by late January 2011, when Coulson resigned.

The lethal new detail in Robert Peston’s blog is that, according to his doubtless impeccable source(s), Sir Jeremy had been relaxed about Coulson seeing sensitive material because, apparently, he had seemed like a “good egg”. I hope and somehow doubt that Sir Jeremy is the source for this expression.

A good egg. It is a lovely, quaint, Wodehousian phrase. But the “good egg” school of security clearance should really have gone out with Burgess, Philby and Maclean. Guy Burgess – what a card! Too drunk to spy competently on anyone, surely? And as for Philby – never mind “good egg”, he was a man of consummate charm.

The shock of those betrayals still endures. The tape of Philby’s MI6 interview in 1963, when he was exposed as a Soviet agent, has never been released. But the film of Philby denying at a 1955 press conference that he was the “third man” who had allowed Burgess and Maclean to escape is still apparently used on MI6 training courses. It is “a masterclass in mendacity.”

To be clear: no-one is accusing Andy Coulson of having been a spy, a traitor or an undercover jihadist (although given what we now know he was arguably vulnerable in other ways, and perhaps therefore a security risk). But the idea that someone could get so close to the prime minister, and to top secret information, on the basis of being a “good egg”, beggars belief. I remember being struck by the closeness – intimacy – of the Cameron/Coulson relationship when pictures of Dave’s first White House visit as prime minister were released. There was the disgraced former News of the World editor sitting just a few feet behind Her Majesty’s First Lord of the Treasury as he chatted to the President of the United States.

Cameron, it is said, knew nothing of Coulson’s (non-)security arrangements. The finger is being pointed at Sir Jeremy Heywood, presumably, as I say, not by Heywood himself. Indeed, the prime minister does seem to have been remarkably incurious about Coulson’s former career and activities, accepting at face value the claim that his director of communications knew nothing at all about phone hacking. Even after all the warnings from distinguished, well-informed and credible people, even after the New York Times’ meticulously researched (and accurate) September 2010 investigation into the News of the World’s industrial scale hacking, Cameron saw no reason to question Coulson further. (But the delayed developed vetting was indeed initiated not long after that NY Times piece appeared.)

We ended up with what Neil Kinnock might have called the “grotesque chaos” of a prime minister being served by a director of communications who, according to Mr Justice Saunders, “has to take the major share for the blame of phone hacking at the News of the World. He knew about it, he encouraged it when he should have stopped it.” Yes, Coulson did a good job for the Conservatives in opposition and in government, and journalists liked working with him. But he should never have been given that job in the first place.

So: cock-up or conspiracy? It is certainly all a magnificent, Class A, 24 carat cock-up. But there is a whiff of something much more troubling here too. And I don’t just mean bad eggs.

Stefan Stern is Contributing Editor of LabourList