British Prime Minister On the Defensive

At LAT:

Reporting from London— After barely a year as Britain's prime minister, David Cameron is facing the gravest crisis of his political career, forced onto the defensive by a spiraling phone-hacking scandal that has sown turmoil in the press, Scotland Yard and the hallowed halls of No. 10 Downing Street.

Cameron came under increasingly heavy fire Monday for appointing a former tabloid editor, Andy Coulson, as his communications director, bringing into his inner circle a man now suspected of conspiring to hack into people's cellphones and of bribing police officers for information. Coulson, who resigned as the government's chief spin doctor in January, was arrested last week.

Normally sure-footed and silver-tongued, the prime minister has struggled to rebut accusations that he displayed alarmingly poor judgment in hiring Coulson over the reservations of other senior politicians and that he cultivated inappropriately close ties with executives working for media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

"He was warned and warned about Andy Coulson," said Jonathan Tonge, a politics professor at the University of Liverpool. "This is Cameron's first crisis for which he is solely accountable."

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