Brooks and Coulson

London, July 24: British prosecutors brought criminal charges today against eight of the most prominent figures in the phone hacking scandal, including Andy Coulson, who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief at 10 Downing Street until the scandal forced his resignation last year.

Also charged was Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain until she, too, resigned last summer. Others who were indicted included four other journalists who played prominent roles at The News of the World, the tabloid where Brooks and later Coulson were the top editors at the time that the hacking is alleged to have occurred, from 2000 to 2006.

The eighth individual charged was Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who served a prison term in 2007, together with The News of the World’s reporter specialising in coverage of the Britain’s royal family, for hacking into the cellphones of younger members of the royal family and their aides. Those convictions remain the only ones so far in the hacking furore.

After today’s announcement by Alison Levitt, the senior legal adviser at the Crown Prosecution Service, headlines in Britain focused on Coulson and Brooks, both of whom have strong personal links to Cameron — Coulson through his years at Cameron’s side, in and out of government, and Brooks because of the friendship she and her husband, horse trainer Charlie Brooks, had with Cameron before the scandal erupted.

Political analysts said the fact that the two now face criminal trials that seem certain to run on at least through the next year, attracting wide news coverage, posed a potentially serious hazard to the Prime Minister.

With a general election due in 2015, the analysts said, Cameron and the Conservative Party are now potentially vulnerable to any new revelations that might emerge from the trials, in the form of hitherto unpublished emails or testimony touching on his dealings with Coulson or Brooks.

The Prime Minister’s judgment in the affair — particularly his recruiting of Coulson as the Conservative Party’s media chief in 2007, and his decision to take him to Downing Street after the 2010 election, long after the hacking that took place on Coulson’s watch at The News of the World became known — is already a major dent in Cameron’s political armour.

With a bloc of about 100 Conservative MPs already deeply restive about other aspects of his stewardship as Prime Minister, mostly because of the political compromises he has struck on important social and economic issues with the Left-leaning Liberal Democrats who are junior partners in the ruling coalition, the criminal charges against Coulson, in particular, seem likely to aggravate questions that Conservative dissenters have been raising about his judgment.

The charges, the most significant so far in a scandal that has rocked British public life and shaken faith in the media, politics and the police, relate to allegations that hundreds of celebrities, politicians and others named in news stories had their voice mail messages intercepted by Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid in a search of scoops.

They refer specifically to more than a dozen high-profile figures, including the actors Jude Law, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who prosecutors say were targeted between 2000 and 2006.

Among the charges against Coulson and Brooks is “conspiracy unlawfully to intercept communications” in the case of Milly Dowler, a British schoolgirl who disappeared in 2002 and was subsequently discovered murdered. It was the revelation that her phone had been hacked that disgusted Britons and led to a tide of outrage and the closing of The News of the World last summer.

Also facing charges are the former managing editor of the tabloid, Stuart Kuttner; two of its senior editors, Ian Edmondson and Greg Miskiw; the reporters Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup; and Mulcaire, the private detective said to be at the heart of the scandal.