Ooh, bitchy!

Dust off your handbags, ladies:

David Cameron must know that he will have to dump Andy Coulson as his PR adviser if he is serious about gaining access to 10 Downing Street. This may appear to be a deeply unfashionable thing to suggest. Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, is a respected professional. And he has, after all, done a terrific job in the last year, making Cameron attractive to the readers of the Mail, the Sun and others, as well as taking the Tory message out to single women, to young mums, and to new voters who, five years ago, would have never considered themselves capable of voting Conservative.

Right. So why the fuck should he leave, then?

Of course there are many people in the PR industry with a past, and many of them do rather well. Matthew Freud, let's not forget, was once arrested for possessing cocaine. Lord (Tim) Bell was once arrested for indecent exposure. But politics, and in-house politics at that, is a different game. When Alastair Campbell became the story, he simply had to go.

Unlike these celebrated and powerful London publicists, Coulson has a clean bill of health. He has never been caught with his hand in the till and has not been found guilty of anything other than writing a few dodgy headlines.

There was the small matter of his resignation from his job as editor in 2007 after one of his star journalists was jailed for plotting to hack into the phone messages of employees of the royal family. Coulson escaped serious censure and left News Corp with a smile on his face, clutching a handful of newspaper awards.

Yet he is guilty by association. "He who touches pitch will be defiled", goes the saying.

Diddums!

But if you also consider the disastrous legal cases lost by the News of the World during his tenure (against Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney, the MP Tommy Sheridan and others), it becomes clear that the Tories' director of communications is prone to go too far in pursuit of what he wants. This makes him a liability to any political party with serious ambition. Inside the lobby Coulson gets a mixed press.

Julian, dah-ling, I realise that you meeja whores all indulge in mutual reach-arounds with the concomitant bitchiness that goes with a surfeit of incest, but really, the rest of the world doesn't give a flying fuck. He's doing a good job of conning the voters, and if David's serious about getting into Number 10, that's the way you do it.