Andy Coulson and his legal team face one more court appearance to decide on who pays his court bill, which will almost certainly run into six figures.
The Crown Prosecution Service in England put Coulson on notice last August that it would seek to recoup a portion of the £750,000 costs amassed in the eight-month phone-hacking trial that resulted in his 18-month jail sentence.
But the matter was deferred until his Scottish trial was over.
With a criminal record, his career as a political spin doctor is over, but after a four-year financial drought triggered by the legal proceedings, he will be desperate to start earning again.
Apart from some work for GQ magazine and consultancy for clients who are said to include the boxing agent Frank Warren, Coulson has not earned since he quit Downing Street in January 2011.
He was forced to sell his house in south London and launched a legal battle to force News International to pay his sizeable legal fees.
Informed sources say he will not be able retrieve his costs from the crown for the Scottish trial despite being acquitted.
After he resigned from his job as David Cameron’s £140,000-a-year director of communications in January, Coulson set up a PR company with his wife called Elbrus Consultants.
The latest public accounts up to 28 February 2014 show assets of just over £7,000 with creditors, likely to be his legal team, due £118,472 within the next year.
Friends that have rallied around him include Warren, Soho House boss Nick Jones, film producer Kris Thykier, Sun columnist Jane Moore and her PR husband Gary Farrow, as well as his former chief reporter and cellmate Neville Thurlbeck.
Farrow said: “Andy and his family have been through absolute hell for the last three years. He has an amazing wife and I know that all he will want to is to concentrate on her and his boys.”
Coulson has kept his counsel throughout the past three years and barely spoke to reporters who shared the same court as him in the eight-month trial at the Old Bailey.
Those who know him well say he has been so focused on the cases that the aftermath will be a major challenge.
One friend said: “It is too early to say what he is going to be doing. He’s been studying, reading the paperwork and going through all the legal challenges put before him for so long, he’s going to have a massive comedown.
“Tonight will be the first time he will be able to have a glass of wine and not have to worry, and he’ll just hang out with his children.”
Another friend expressed fury that Coulson had been “made to carry the burden, whatever your opinion of what went on at News International and other newspapers”.
A third friend said: “He has lost two major careers. He is relieved it’s all over but he doesn’t retain any bitterness, which is a good thing.”
It remains to be seen whether Rupert Murdoch’s News International will pay Coulson’s court costs.
When he was first arrested, the company refused, but he brought NI to court and after a lengthy legal battle that went all the way to the supreme court, it was ruled that NI did have to indemnify him against costs and expenses relating to his defence.
Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ, will almost certainly continue to offer publishing opportunities.
There may also be work via Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive of the Telegraph Media Group, another supporter who was a character witness in the hacking trial at the Old Bailey.
Claims during the trial by the News of the World’s former royal editor Clive Goodman that Coulson had written “a treatment of his life” have been dismissed by those who know him, who say a book lifting the lid on his years with the Tory party was more likely.
