Cameron: OK, I Shouldn't Have Hired Coulson

David Cameron gave a defiant speech before parliament today, in which he offered a kinda-sorta mea culpa for hiring ex-News of the World executive Andy Coulson. “With 20-20 hindsight and all that has followed, I would not have offered him the job and I expect that he wouldn't have taken it,” the British prime minister said, according to the Telegraph. “But you don't make decisions in hindsight. … You live and you learn and believe you me, I have learned.”

Cameron said Coulson’s work had been excellent. “I have an old-fashioned view about innocent until proven guilty,” he said. “But if it turns out I have been lied to, that would be a moment for a profound apology.” He ducked questions, meanwhile, on the BSkyB takeover, repeatedly saying he’d had “no inappropriate conversations” with News Corp executives about it. Labour was not satisfied. What, one young MP demanded, were the “appropriate conversations” then? (More David Cameron stories.)