A Follow Up: Cameron's interview with NY Times

As I was scouting major U.S. media Web sites today to find who's reporting on the Guardian's report on widespread phone tapping by the Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid, I found this interesting gem from The New York Times: an interview with Tory leader David Cameron, set to be published in their Sunday magazine.

Cameron has defied calls from members of Parliament to sack PR director Andy Coulson, who left his post as editor of News of the World following the initial hacking incident. This excerpt from the Cameron profile piece, written by Christopher Caldwell, might provide insight as to Cameron's apparent determination to keep Coulson on board:

The party is run, for the most part, by the intimates of Cameron who occupy a single suite of offices in Norman Shaw South, a parliamentary office building on the Thames, a block away from the Palace of Westminster. Iain Martin of The Telegraph coined the term “the Quartet” to describe the four figures — Cameron; his shadow chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne; his policy adviser, Steve Hilton; and his director of communications, Andy Coulson — who are at the heart of all the shadow government’s decisions. . . . .Coulson is credited with translating Cameron’s agenda into terms that a nonmetropolitan public can understand: less about the environment and more about immigration. Less about social responsibility and more about social breakdown. To assume Cameron needs coaching from Coulson or anyone else about the popular media may be to give Cameron too little credit. He spent seven years, after all, working at a television company that did a lot of down-market programming. Cameron makes his immersion in popular culture a point of pride. When he met Barack Obama last summer, he gave him the gift of some favorite CDs — the Smiths, Radiohead, Gorillaz, Lily Allen.

If Cameron's trying to become the next Thomas Dewey, this might be a start.