Fireman Matthew

After 10 days fending off the media onslaught - 600 calls, according to office logs - a rare joke swept through Matthew Freud's Fitzrovia office last night: "Now that Stephen Byers has gone, it might be a good time to sneak out some more revelations about Angus ..." Even for London's notoriously manipulative PR king, the raucous laughter suggested a palpable relief that the convoy was finally moving on.

For ever since the News of the World exposed Angus Deayton as a cocaine-snorting philanderer, it has been Freud - Deayton's friend and "emergency" publicist - who has been straining to shape the message. All he has done, he claims, is make it easier for Deayton and his partner, the writer Lise Meyer, to cope with the intense public scrutiny about the presenter's "drugs romp" with a call-girl.

But has his firefighter PR role, as a Daily Telegraph leader claimed, merely "ill-served" his friend through excessive spinning?

There is little doubt that Deayton benefited from coverage slanted towards his "incredible lovemaking", barely mentioning his long-term partner and young son. As "vice girl" Caroline Martin told the News of the World: "He may be 45, but he did things to me I only wish more men knew how to do. That made me groan for mercy."

Coincidentally, the Murdoch-owned paper's editor, Rebekah Wade, also knows Freud socially and - with Deayton - attended his wedding to Elisabeth Murdoch last year. Many in Fleet Street believe that a deal was struck between friends to suppress further damaging revelations in exchange for cooperation.

"The News of the World handled it as kindly as they could have done," says a PR source who has talked to key players this week. "It could have been a lot heavier, especially over the drugs involved."

Freud insists that he learned of the paper's scoop only at 4pm on the Saturday, and so could not possibly have influenced its coverage. It is, he suggests, " nonsense" to suggest a deal could be done to water down a genuine scoop.

The paper itself says it had "a classic sting", which resulted from an approach from Martin to its Manchester office several weeks ago that culminated in Deayton's entrapment. Freud then spent the following week updating the tabloids that "it's a bit frosty at home" and that "Lise's opinion of Angus is unprintable".

By last Sunday, he had persuaded Deayton to tell his story to the Sunday Mirror, and Meyer to talk at length to the Mail on Sunday. No money changed hands, and both interviews were sympathetic to Deayton, "a broken man oozing with guilt" whom Meyer described as "an absolute hero".

By common consent, Freud's strategy worked. "It was effective," admits rival publicist Max Clifford, who last week received a "matey" call from Freud alerting him to other possible approaches from those seeking to profit from revelations about Deayton. "He said, 'If anyone phones up about Angus, could you mark my card?' I hadn't spoken to him for years."

Mark Borkowski, another celebrity PR, sees Freud's response as "just bloody good common sense", notably the use of rival tabloids in week two to ensure that the News of the World would need a major new angle to stretch the story to a third week.

"Matthew's great skill is he that he can talk, and has relationships with editors," Borkowski says. "They had Angus bang to rights - so he did a fantastic job to show he was good in bed."

His widespread influence makes it difficult to find colleagues or even rivals willing to speak on the record about Freud. Anonymously, they describe him as something of a bully: free with threats and manipulative, "too full of himself ", and "very clever but too big for his boots".

Freud himself does not enjoy being part of the story, dismissing pieces like this as perverse. But if Angus Deayton's career survives this very public humiliation, he will owe his old friend Matthew big time.