Andy Coulson: Blue-eyed boy

At Westminster, they called it a bolt from the Tory blue. But when David Cameron unveiled Andy Coulson as his chief spin-doctor on Thursday, plenty of Coulson's old Fleet Street colleagues were able to claim they saw it coming.

Just before Christmas last year, when Coulson was still editing the News of the World, both he and his deputy, Neil Wallis, received festive cards from the Conservative leader. Close inspection revealed them to be identical, but for one crucial respect: the inky signature on Coulson's card was genuine; Wallis got a facsimile.

The incident didn't just form the backbone of much seasonal banter; it also summed up Andy Coulson's status in life rather well. At 39, he had risen to the top table of Britain's media operators and become the sort of person that ambitious politicians like David Cameron desperately needed to court.

And court they did, culminating in Coulson's appointment as the Tories' new director of communications and planning, on a salary rumoured to be £485,000. Despite his understated manner, and deliberately low profile, he's just become one of the most powerful men in the country.

As the headline-writers have noted, Coulson's sober, three-button suits, and steely professionalism, hide a colourful character whose newspapers have shaped popular culture - bringing us "Sven's secret affair," "Blunkett's affair with a married woman," and 101 other scoops.

Coulson is also a controversial figure. In January, he was forced to resign in the wake of the NoW phone-tapping scandal after his royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed for conspiracy to intercept messages to senior members of the royal family, and their servants. Goodman is now pursuing an unfair dismissal suit against his former employer - a case that could see Coulson called to the witness box. All of which means that not everyone in Tory circles is impressed by his elevation to the role of chief spinner, particularly since the party's ruling board was not consulted about the appointment.

"What sort of message does this send to our supporters about the man we have chosen to communicate our message to the country?" thundered one MP in yesterday's Telegraph. "I fear we think this is a way to try to get the support of Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers. If that's what it's about, it is cack-handed."

Yet the subject of his ire is no muck-raking gargoyle. Described by one friend as "a snappy dresser and a smart thinker", the Essex-boy-made-good is cultured and well read, and has for more than a decade been heralded as the golden boy of popular journalism.

With this in mind, most former colleagues yesterday billed Coulson's appointment as a coup. "Andy is one of the best journalists I have ever worked with," says Piers Morgan, who gave him his first Fleet Street job in 1988.

"He's calm, focused, determined, loyal, charming, professional and hates losing. I expect him to grab Cameron's media presentation and give it the good kick up the junta it sorely needs. Don't be misled by the Essex accent: he's much smarter than the old Etonians he's about to work with."

Either way, Andy Coulson will move into Conservative HQ on 9 July, in time for the bruising battle that will follow Gordon Brown's elevation to Prime Minister. After 20 years at the coal-face of popular journalism he's perfectly versed in the dark arts needed to combat Brown's media machine.

"Andy knows Rupert Murdoch very well," says Phil Hall, a friend and former NoW editor. "They have a good relationship, and Andy will bring that relationship to the Tories. He's also best friends with Rebekah Wade [editor of The Sun], and papers like that will be where the war is won."

The appointment has also drawn comparisons with Tony Blair's decision to appoint Alastair Campbell, then the Daily Mirror's political editor, as his press chief in the mid-1990s. Yet while the two men share a love of football (Coulson follows Tottenham, Campbell follows Burnley) their styles couldn't be more different.

Campbell was a vocal bully, while Coulson is from the modern school of hackery: urbane, charming, and mild-mannered. Rather than throw typewriters, he will typically administer a "bollocking" by way of email. "Andy exudes calm and supreme confidence," says a former staffer. "He never shouts. Instead, he'll drift in and be menacing without raising his voice. At the NoW, he'd threaten editors with sweet words like, 'I'm sure you're going to pull a good splash out of the bag'. He deploys authority in a professional way."

Politically, Coulson is equally difficult to pigeon-hole. His newspaper backed Tony Blair at the last general election, and was critical of many of Cameron's softer Tory policies. Yet friends describe him as a natural Conservative.

"When people first started talking about David Cameron and George Osborne, Andy told me that he really liked what he saw with Cameron but was not impressed by Osborne," says one ex-colleague. "I don't think he's a massively political type of person," said another, the former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie, in an interview with the BBC. "But he is an Essex boy who has done well for himself."

Andy Coulson was born in 1968, and bought up in Wickford, near Billericay. Unlike most leading journalists, he was educated at the local state school, Beauchamps Comprehensive. A bright spark without being academically gifted, he was hired at 18 as a cub reporter on the Basildon Evening Echo. His big break came in 1988, when he was offered freelance work on the Sun's pop column Bizarre, a sort of finishing school for the newspaper's future stars.

Piers Morgan, his first boss there, describes Coulson as a "natural from the start". He spent six years hobnobbing with celebrities and publicists before being briefly poached by the Daily Mail's then associate editor, Ian Monk, in 1994.

"At 25, he was No.2 or 3 on Bizarre," recalls Monk. "He was plainly the best showbusiness guy on the block, so I bought him to the Daily Mail. He'd been there nine weeks when I had a call saying Andy was about to resign, because he'd been nicked back, to edit Bizarre.

"Andy's an extremely sharp media operator who understands the angles and the mechanics of a story, and the deals that have to be made around a story. He's also straight in his dealings, which should serve him very well in his current role."

Back at the Sun, Coulson became associate editor, and gained a reputation as a safe pair of hands with an occasional appetite for mischief. At Bizarre, he once fed a false story to a rival at the Mirror that Paula Yates was having a rib removed, for cosmetic reasons.

He joined the News of the World in 2000 as Rebekah Wade's deputy, and succeeded her in 2003 when she moved to edit the Sun. In his three-and-a-bit years at its helm, the NoW broke a series of iconic scoops, and won Newspaper of the Year at the 2005 British Press Awards.

It wasn't all plain sailing, though. Following one murky episode, Coulson was forced to defend Mazher Mahmood, the notorious investigative reporter, for his role in a story about an alleged plot to kidnap David Beckham's children. In another, he lost a high-profile libel case to the left-wing Scottish MP, Tommy Sheridan.

Though his paper retained a reputation as the Rolls Royce of Sunday red-tops, it also suffered circulation decline in line with most of its rivals. In Coulson's last month as editor, it sold just over 3,400,000 copies a week, down almost 10 per cent year-on-year, and well below the four million it shifted at the start of his reign.

He also became involved in a feud with London's foremost scandal-monger, Max Clifford, following a NoW exposé of the pop singer Kerry Katona, one of Mr Clifford's clients. It rumbled on for almost two years, and saw Coulson frozen out in the race for "scoops" like Jude Law's affair with his nanny, and the civil servant Tracey Temple's account of her fling with John Prescott.

The Clive Goodman case was the nail in Coulson's coffin. His resignation prevented the PCC quizzing him over the affair, meaning we can't be sure exactly how much he knew about it. But his statement of resignation admitted "ultimate responsibility" for Goodman's actions.

In the five months since, Coulson has taken time on holiday in Thailand with his wife Eloise and two children, with whom he lives quietly in South London. He's also kept up with old contacts, and was recently spotted lunching with The Observer's editor Roger Alton at the Ivy.

"Andy's a family man, very quiet, and doesn't have a huge set of friends. But he does like golf and spending time with his family," says the publicist Gary Farrow, a close friend. "He's also very well read, and always has a balanced view of what's going on."

In the immediate future, his priority, in the words of one close friend, is to "deliver" the Murdoch press for Cameron's Tories. Further down the line, a bigger struggle may lie in attracting support from both the Telegraph and Mail, whose editor, Paul Dacre, is said to be a personal, if not always spiritual admirer of Gordon Brown.

The urbane "golden boy" of Britain's red-top titles may soon feel the heat, then, as he attempts to breathe new life into the dustier reaches of the Tory party. But when his well-dressed back is up against the wall, he can always draw on the last resource of the British journalist: humour.

"Andy's strength of character and ability to cut to the chase will see him become quietly influential," says one of his oldest friends, the publicist Alan Edwards. "The fact that one old Tory backbencher called him 'an awful chap' has only confirmed my feelings that he will now play a very important part in shaping perceptions of the Conservative Party. And quite possibly the UK itself."

A Life in Brief

BORN 21 January 1968. Parents moved from their Basildon council house to nearby Wickford during his childhood.

EDUCATION Beauchamps Comprehensive, Wickford 1979-1986

CAREER Reporter, Basildon Evening Echo, 1986-1988. Showbusiness reporter, The Sun, 1988-1994. Showbusiness correspondent, the Daily Mail, 1994. Bizarre editor, The Sun, 1994-8. Associate editor, The Sun, 1998-9. Editorial director, News Network, News International's internet arm, 1999-2000. Deputy editor, the News of the World, 2000. Editor, The News of the World, 2003-7.

HE SAYS "The News of the World doesn't pretend to do anything other than reveal big stories and titillate and entertain the public, while exposing crime and hypocrisy," on receiving the Press Gazette Newspaper of the Year award in 2005.

THEY SAY "It was obvious that Andy was interested in politics and had a number of strongly-held views - many of which wouldn't have been out of place at a Conservative Party conference." - Alan Edwards, publicist