ANDREW PIERCE: How Tory jail cuts hacked off David Cameron’s top aide

Few Tory luminaries, it appears, had more harrowing personal experiences of the coalition government’s austerity measures than David Cameron’s former Downing Street communications director Andy Coulson.

The ex-News of the World editor, who was jailed for 18 months in 2014 for presiding over an epidemic of phone hacking at his newspaper a decade earlier, has discussed the experience in an interview with the Crisis What Crisis? podcast, which he usually presents.

He described his grim journey in a prison van from the Old Bailey to the Category A Belmarsh jail in South-East London: ‘The building is out of central casting: enormous American-style prison walls, massive gates, you’re in no doubt you’re going to prison.’ 

Coulson, 52, who now runs a crisis management firm, added that he spent most of the time in his cell. ‘You would be allowed out for an hour and then do another 23 hours.’

Andy Coulson, the ex-News of the World editor, has discussed the experience in an interview with the Crisis What Crisis? podcast

But the most poignant recollection came when Coulson asked why he was not in an open prison, the normal category for someone convicted of his type of crime. A warder replied: ‘Tory cuts, Andy.’

 Bojo as PM is ‘stranger than fiction’

One-time New Labour cheerleader Robert Harris — author of best-selling thrillers such as Fatherland and Enigma — also wrote a thinly disguised attack on Tony Blair entitled The Ghost, which was turned into a film starring Pierce Brosnan.

Asked by the New Statesman if he would subject Boris Johnson to the same literary treatment, Harris said: ‘It’s a cliche but when the politicians have become such extraordinary figures, fiction withers and dies in the face of them . . . 

‘If I tried to write a novel in which Donald Trump became president, and carried on the way he has, or where Johnson would be PM, everyone would say, ‘No. This doesn’t obey plausible rules.’ ‘

 KINNOCK kicks the loony left

That hammer of the Left Lord Kinnock can’t believe the Militant tendency returned to hijack Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the form of Momentum. ‘I thought I’d killed them off,’ says the former Labour leader. ‘They did go away for 30 years and came back not one bloody millisecond wiser.’ Which aspect of the Trot revival does he have most contempt for? ‘The superficiality and use of slogans in place of real policies. The manifesto was packed with promises . . . People still believe in the spirit of Christmas but not in the Tooth Fairy.’ For once he’s right. 

 Impressionist Rory Bremner has the measure of Downing Street. ‘Like storms,

Government U-turns are now so frequent we’re going to have to give them names,’ he says. Should the first one be Boris?

When Sir Keir Starmer closes Labour’s virtual three-day party conference tomorrow, organisers may reflect on their wisdom in choosing Babl Cloud to handle the tech. Its boss is Brexiteer Jonathan Grant, who once retweeted this by the Bruges Group: ‘The cold hard truth is that it’s Boris’s Brexit or not at all.’ A bit embarrassing for Starmer, who once pledged to put Brexit to a second referendum.

 Veteran singer-songwriter Van Morrison has released three absurd anti-lockdown protest songs. They bring to mind broadcaster Mark Ellen’s telling observation about the irascible singer: ‘There are two types of people in this world. Those who love Van Morrison. And those who’ve met Van Morrison.’

 If ‘frivolous’ demands for Covid tests really are responsible for the capacity shortfall, as one minister has suggested, the Government only has itself to blame. Its adverts are running with the message: ‘At the first sign of a cough, stay at home and get tested.’

 Former Chancellor Ken Clarke, 80, was showered with compliments when he took his seat in the House of Lords last week, but Tory MP Damian Green points out: ‘The great thing about all these (justified) Twitter tributes to Ken is that you absolutely know he won’t see any of them.’ Clarke famously never looks at social media.