Hugh Grant: ‘I warned Osborne that it was a mistake hiring Andy Coulson’

The actor explains how he had heated words with the Chancellor when they met at a dinner party before the 2010 election It is not often you get a chance to have a really good discussion about conditional fee agreements and how they play into the Jackson review of civil litigation costs, and it is even less often you get to have that discussion with Hugh Grant. But since the actor took up the cause of phone hacking, touring the party conferences and meeting party leaders at each, Grant admits he has “mugged up”. In his early days of righteous anger at the way in which it had intruded into his life, Grant called for the entire tabloid press to be shut down. He also sometimes came across as a man who only wanted publicity on his terms. Now, attending the Conservative conference to speak at a fringe meeting, and to meet David Cameron, he has refined his take on how to deal with media malfeasance – but has not lost any of his outrage, much of it directed at the Conservatives for trying to airbrush the phone-hacking issue out of the conference. He reveals that his hatred of News International is longstanding; and indeed before the election he had a bust up with George Osborne over the appointment of Andy Coulson as director of communications at No 10. “I happened to meet George Osborne at a dinner party before the election. I said: ‘I tell you what, you have made a catastrophic mistake in hiring Coulson.’ And he pooh-poohed me completely. It actually got a bit awkward and our hostess had to calm us down.” He said he wanted to hear directly from Cameron on why he appointed Coulson, and why the prime minister accepted Coulson’s explanation that a lone rogue employee had hacked phones under his editorship at News of the World. “I really want to know the answer: did he allow Coulson into No 10, and get involved with the Murdoch empire generally speaking, a) out of naivety, b) out of reluctant pragmatism – ‘we know they are monsters, but it is the only way to get into power and stay in power’, or c) out of unreluctant pragmatism, ie, this is what politicians weaned on the teeth of spin do?” He finds it inconceivable that Cameron did not know Coulson had overseen a culture of phone hacking at the paper. “If I knew – and pretty well everyone I knew,

Posted by on October 4, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.