Andy McSmith's Diary: Andy Coulson plays his ‘out of jail card’ to co-found PR firm

He has teamed up with Henry Chappell to form the PR agency, Coulson Chappell

Andy Coulson (Getty)

David Cameron’s former spin master, Andy Coulson, having served his time in jail for his part in the phone-hacking scandal, and having been cleared of a charge of perjury in Scotland, is embarking on a new venture. He has teamed up with Henry Chappell, a specialist in sport, to form the PR agency, Coulson Chappell.

“I’ve always wanted to establish and grow my own company,” he told PR Week. I can imagine sitting in jail dreaming of being free and able to run a PR agency. Doesn’t every jailbird feel the same?

Who can sing like Corbyn?

Theatregoers will doubtless be flocking to Corbyn the Musical: The Motorcycle Diaries when it opens in April. It is a satire, of course, by Rupert Myers and Bobby Friedman, in which a motorcycle holiday Corbyn allegedly shared with Diane Abbott in the 1970s is central to the plot.

More than 31 years have gone by since an actor named David Kernan did a superb impersonation of Corbyn’s friend Ken Livingstone in a London theatre production called The Ratepayers’ Iolanthe. Whether an actor can be found who can mimic Corbyn with such accuracy remains to be seen.

Fatal ‘Ed Stone’ cost £8,000

However hard the satirists try, they will never dream up anything to match the day when Ed Miliband stood in a car park in front of an 8ft 6in-high stone monolith on which some of his election pledges were carved.

Since the general election, political nerds have been desperate to discover the whereabouts of the legendary Ed Stone. But if a report from the Bloomberg agency is correct, the tragic truth is that it is no longer exists. It was pulverised soon after the election defeat.

The same report refutes a rumour that the stone cost £30,000. The real cost, reportedly, was £8,000. A bargain. But who for?

In support of one-sided action

Jon Lansman, founder of Momentum, has written a blog in which he quotes approvingly about a comment made by the ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock when Ed Miliband took over the party leadership in September 2010 – “We’ve got our party back.”

That is how Lansman feels with Corbyn at the helm, though he argues that the task of making the Labour Party truly democratic “does require taming MPs.” That should be done not through the whips’ office, he argued, but by amending party rules to give more power to the members.

He added: “It involves risks, and if you lose the vote you have to accept it or, like Gaitskell, ‘fight, and fight, and fight again, to bring back sanity and honesty’.”

The Gaitskell quote, which actually was “fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love’” was spoken as he pleaded in vain to the 1960 Labour Party conference not to vote for a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Neil Kinnock fought a long battle in the 1980s to get Labour to drop its policy of unilateralism. That makes them strange authorities to pray in aid of Corbyn, who plans to go over the heads of his own MPs and get party members to make Labour a unilateralist party once more.

Murdoch’s ‘brainy giraffe’

I enjoyed Fi Glover’s reaction to a love story that has touched all our hearts. “Rupert Murdoch is heading down the aisle for the fourth time – with Jerry Hall, the gorgeous Texan brainy giraffe of beauty,” she wrote in Waitrose Weekend.

“What lessons has he learnt? ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, and then try again’? But there’s always someone who takes it too far...”