All prime ministers leave office reviled. That is because, like inveterate gamblers, they can’t step away from the table until every last penny of their political capital is spent. So David Cameron will eventually be so disliked as to be unelectable; the only questions for his opponents are when and why.
The phone-hacking scandal offers some clues. Cameron has been wounded by the affair but not grievously. The main villains of the saga are the journalists who violated the privacy of traumatised families and the media bosses who allegedly covered up systemic criminality in their newsrooms. The Prime Minister has a tangential connection to those allegations through Andy Coulson, his director of communications from May 2007 to January 2011, and editor of the News of the World when hacking was out of control. On 8 July, Coulson was arrested on corruption charges. That leaves a whiff of complacency and bad judgement around Cameron – but no politician ever died of a whiff.
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