He subsequently joined David Cameron's personnel as communications director, until announcing his departure on 21 January 2011 because of continued media coverage of the phone-hacking affair.
[8] He was detained and charged with perjury by Strathclyde Police on 30 May 2012 in relation to evidence he had given in the trial of Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan in 2010, and cleared on 3 June 2015.
[21] Coulson resigned on 26 January 2007 over the News of the World phone hacking affair which would several weeks later see the jailing for four months of the paper's Royal correspondent Clive Goodman.
[27] After David Cameron became Prime Minister in May 2010, he appointed Coulson as Director of Communications for the government at 10 Downing Street.
The judge hearing Coulson's trial was critical of the prime minister, pondering whether the intervention was out of ignorance or deliberate, and demanded an explanation.
[39] As the Conservative Party's director of communications, Coulson continued to be subjected to allegations that he was aware of the hacking of phones while serving as the editor of News of the World.
On 7 July 2009, John Prescott called on leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron to remove Coulson from his position, after The Guardian revealed further details about phone-hacking by the News of the World.
[44] And Clive Goodman, in a letter from 2007: "The practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the editor.
"[45] A report aired on Channel 4's Dispatches in October included remarks made by an unnamed source, said to have been a former senior journalist at the News of the World who worked alongside Coulson.
[48] However, the Crown Prosecution Service said in December 2010 that it had determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Coulson over allegations that he was aware of phone-hacking at the publication.
The CPS said that witnesses interviewed by Metropolitan Police – including those who had previously made allegations through media outlets – had not been willing to provide admissible evidence.
[59] In June 2014, Coulson was found guilty of one charge of conspiracy to intercept voicemails and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison on 4 July 2014.
It was reported that as a condition of his early release on home detention curfew (HDC) Coulson would have to wear an electronic tag until he had served half of his full sentence.
[60][61] Coulson was to face a retrial, together with the News of the World's former royal editor Clive Goodman, after the jury failed to agree a verdict on two other charges of conspiring to cause misconduct in public office in relation to the alleged purchase of confidential royal phone directories in 2005 from a palace police officer.
[13] On 17 April 2015, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Coulson's retrial was to be scrapped, along with that of Goodman and the trials of seven other journalists.
Explaining his ruling, Lord Burns said that for Coulson to be found guilty it was necessary for the Crown to prove that the allegedly untrue evidence he had given at the 2010 Sheridan trial had been relevant to the issues in it.
The judge added that it was for him, and not the jury, to decide on this aspect of the case and that the Crown's legal submissions had failed to satisfy him that Coulson's evidence had been sufficiently relevant to the Sheridan trial.
Speaking outside the court, Coulson said: "I'm just delighted that after four pretty testing years my family and myself have finally had a good day".