Media

The warnings from Auntie’s leading hacks have been heeded – the strike has been cancelled. There is no done deal and the government is still in the union’s crosshairs: the strike has been delayed to the 19th and 20th October, the day of the comprehensive spending review, pending further consultation. All this raises a few points. First, Ed Miliband scores by having urged the NUJ to drop its plans in favour of impartiality – very New Politics, now matter how opportunistic the initial impulse to further debase the moniker ‘Red Ed’. The BBC has, for the moment, denied its detractors a major publicity coup, not that I think that Jeremy Hunt and the Tories would be crass enough to claim that a strike was evidence of biased journalism.

Amongst BBC political staff, there’s mounting concern about the plans for a strike during Tory conference. One of them said to me at Labour conference that they just didn’t know what to do, they had been put in an impossible position by the decision to call the strike on such politically important days. These journalists fear that striking during Tory conference would undermine the corporation’s reputation for impartiality. So, a whole host of them wrote to their union rep asking him to make representations on their behalf.

To these eyes, this afternoon's phone hacking debate was a surprisingly sedate affair. Chris Bryant – proposing a motion to have an inquiry conducted by the Standards and Privileges committee into the News of the World's actions – seemed to go out his way to depoliticise the argument, and other Labour MPs followed his lead. And so there was relatively little mention of Andy Coulson, with the emphasis instead on the wrongs that might have been done to the House by the police and the media more generally. It was, then, little surprise that Bryant's motion was passed unanimously. There were some flashes of controversy and acid, though. Bryant himself went quite hard on the police, claiming that they had not fulfilled their "duty of care".

David Cameron’s father has suffered a stroke on holiday in France and so the PM is, understandably, travelling out there to be with him. This means that Nick Clegg will be standing in for him at PMQs. At the risk of sounding Jo Mooreish, this shift in PMQs personnel has political implications. Labour was always planning to use today to try and associate Cameron personally with Coulson and the whole voicemail interception story. That, obviously, can’t happen now. But Labour could ask Nick Clegg a series of awkward questions on this, has the deputy prime minister sought personal assurances from the director of communications about what he knew of phone hacking at the News of the World while he was editor and the like.

Lucy Manning reports that Keith Vaz’s Home Affairs Select Committee will convene an investigation into the phone tapping scandal. Hauling Yates up before his eminence was a sleight of hand, calling for a second inquiry is as obvious as Jordan. Labour is confident and Coulson is their target. However, the Home Affairs Committee is more likely to examine the police’s inept investigations than the inner workings of a tabloid newsroom. (And so, according to Vaz, it will transpire.) Coulson will remain in the clear unless the CPS brings a prosecution on the basis of Sean Hoare’s new evidence.

Theresa May channeled Chris Tavaré today, every question on this phone tapping scandal was met with a solid defensive answer. She was helped by the number of Labour MPs who overreached — one compared it to Watergate while Dennis Skinner, who is nowhere near the Commons performer he once was, produced an ill-judged demand that Cameron come to the Commons and sack Coulson. Those MPs who were most effective were the ones who kept their cool. The personal testimony of Chris Bryant was particularly powerful.   Perhaps, the most noteworthy element of the proceedings was how a particularly glum looking Ming Campbell and Simon Hughes kept whispering to each other with concerned expressions on their faces. Neither man appeared to be happy with May’s answers.

As we drift into the weekend, Labour are stepping up their attacks on Andy Coulson. Already today, Tom Watson, Alan Johnson, John Prescott and Chris Bryant have all drawn noisy attention to the allegations made in that New York Times Magazine article about phone tapping and the News of the World – and their efforts have already pushed the story to the top of the BBC news agenda. Indeed, Bryant has even called for David Cameron to sack Coulson. Labour types will no doubt repeat that message constantly over the next few days. So far, the Tories are standing behind their comms chief. A statement from No.10 reiterated that Coulson "totally and utterly denies" the allegations made against him.

Up until today, the Hague-Myers story was confined to scurrilous rumour on Guido’s blog and the occasional cautious article in the Telegraph or the Mail; the rest of the media were uninterested. But, as James notes, Hague’s two extraordinarily frank statements, particularly yesterday’s impassioned denial to ‘set the record straight’, have forced the issue into the mainstream political debate. The personal always becomes political. What of William Hague’s judgement? John Redwood condemns Hague’s ‘poor judgement’ in personal matters before going on to cast aspersions on his policy judgements, particularly those relating to the EU.