Andy Coulson: my part in his downfall (with apologies to Spike Milligan)

On 25 November, my Coventry Conversations series featured David Yelland, former editor of the Sun, now a PR man and an alumni of Lanchester Polytechnic, the forerunner of Coventry University.

Yelland was 'back home' and unloaded himself honestly about his life, his alcoholism, his alopecia, Rupert Murdoch and more. Towards the end of the hour I threw him a softball about his former number-three on the Sun, Andy Coulson, claiming to not know about the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire being paid £100,000 a year to hack into mobile phones to get a story or two. 

Yelland (right) was quick and ruthless: "As an editor, I can't believe a fellow editor would not know phone tapping was in action, especially with the rumoured remuneration of £100,000 to a private detective. Anything more than £1,000 would have to be signed off by someone in deep carpet land. It would be impossible for anyone at News International to not know what was going on."

With one or two phrases, Yelland had destroyed the 'single rogue reporter defence' which Andy Coulson and others in News International's 'deep carpet land' were using to deflect the attacks on their journalistic ethics.

These things have habit of spreading beyond Coventry.

I sent it to Journalism.co.uk - "Former Sun editor expresses doubt over Coulson's phone hacking denials" - and within a day Yelland's comments had been picked up by Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief of the Guardian, and from him to Nick Davies, the paper's ace investigator who had driven the Coulson story.

Thence to media commentator Roy Greenslade in his Guardian column, replete with a jibe or two at the editorial abilities of Yelland. Yelland on Coulson was now 'out there'.

A colleague said to me after Yelland had left us: "If you report what he said about Coulson you could cost Andy his job."

Prescient? Small ripples in the tsunami that eventually consumed Coulson. Adieu Andy.

John Mair invented and runs the Coventry Conversations at Coventry University. This week, Andy Kershaw and Chris 'Starsucker' Atkins will be coming to converse on Thursday and Friday 27/28 January.