Andy Coulson lives to spin another day

Anyone expecting MPs would today pin the News of the World phone-hacking story onto David Cameron's media chief Andy Coulson have been severely disappointed.

During a lengthy session in front of the Commons media select committee, the former editor of the paper repeated his line that he knew nothing about the hacking activities of his then royal reporter Clive Goodman and a private investigator.

And, displaying his qualification as both an editor and a spin doctor, he handed the watching press a juicy story to distract them - by revealing Scotland Yard had last Friday informed him it was likely his own phone had been hacked. Not, he assumed, by the News of the World.

Coulson's line was pretty straightforward and exploited the weakness in his enemies' case that "he must have known" what his reporter was up to and that there were probably many other reporters doing the same thing.

Time and again he insisted he did not know and demanded evidence to prove the contrary. Not even the Guardian, who started this latest row, had provided such evidence, admitting it did not possess any. And that, pretty much, was an end to it.

Goodman, he insisted, had been a one-off "rogue reporter" who had deceived him and there was no evidence to show he had known about Goodman's activities or that phone hacking was a widespread practice by reporters under his editorship.

This is exactly the reassurance Coulson had given David Cameron when the Tory leader took him on shortly after he resigned from the News of the World after taking responsibility for what had happened "on his watch".

The result of those reassurances was that Cameron stuck to his man when the latest media storm erupted, led by Guardian revelations about the practice of phone hacking.

Cameron saw the story as a politically-motivated attempt to hit back at the Tories after the Damian McBride "smear emails" affair which had badly damaged Gordon Brown. He stuck by Coulson, claiming his aide had been completely frank with him when given the job and had reassured him there would be no comeback.

If those reassurances had proved optimistic or even downright misleading, Coulson would have been out on his ear. But after today's hearing, on the last day before the Commons' long summer holiday, he remains safe in his post and this particular aspect of the row over phone hacking appears to have run its course.