Standing room only on the grassy knoll

It’s standing room only on the grassy knoll. Or at least it is if you believe the garbled conspiracy theories being peddled around by the ABC, Channel 9, Fairfax Media and the Guardian concerning the political demise of Malcolm Turnbull.

Depending on who you watch, listen to or read, the view is Turnbull’s end came not with a loss of confidence from the majority of the Liberal Party room but by means of a conspiracy hatched between Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes and their minions.

Two days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald offered 260 headlines from articles published in The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, and, oddly, grabs from the Fairfax owned radio station 2GB as the barrels of multiple smoking guns, reeking of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and ammonia from the third-floor window of the book depository.

That voluminous list contained a column I wrote the week before Malcolm Turnbull lost the party room and the prime ministership not in one fell swoop but, as actual evidence shows, in gradations beginning many months prior and culminating on Thursday August 23.

But let’s not bother too much with anything silly like facts or evidence. To be attributed the sort of influence where it is considered I may hire and fire prime ministers by a little deft work on a keyboard is just recognition and I fully intend to let it go to my head.

I’ve been undermining the cat ever since although I think he still has the numbers to survive a spill. I’ll work on that. I will not stop my pervasive influence peddling until Bruce Doull (the Jesus of Australian Rules football) is made President of Australia for Life. He’d be terrific by the way.

Seriously, the bullshit is so thick you could stir it with a stick. The convoluted, evidence-free assumptions are not unlike the crazy 9-11 conspiracy theories where we were asked to accept a byzantine scheme contrary to what we had witnessed with our own eyes on our own television screens.

The fact that journalists of some note have been hawking this nonsense is disturbing.

I received no instruction, no intimation, not a word of urging one way or another before I wrote that article or indeed any other that I have contributed to The Australian. I am not on Rupert Murdoch’s speed dial. The shadowy business of groupthink sometimes alluded to by critics doesn’t make a lot of sense in my case either. I sometimes write from Canberra, sometimes from Sydney if other work drags me to these places, but for the most part I am banging out sentences in a darkened room at my home in the beautiful Southern Highlands.

Winston Churchill mused that history is written by the victors. But in this case history is being rewritten on behalf of the loser.

The more troubling issue is journalists like the ABC’s Andrew Probyn, Channel 9’s Chris Uhlmann and a small army of scribblers at Fairfax and The Guardian are attempting to rewrite history, a history in this case that is less than a month old.

History is not, nor should it ever be, a catalogue of gossip, insinuation and imputation that may suit our prejudices. At some point we have to accept objective facts.

On the Friday before the spill, Ray Hadley announced on 2GB radio (to repeat, a Fairfax owned entity) that Peter Dutton was mounting a challenge to Malcolm Turnbull. We were told that a spill would happen within weeks or possibly days.

When the parliamentary party assembled the following Tuesday, Malcolm Turnbull rose from his seat and brought on a spill. Dutton got to his feet and announced his candidacy. Turnbull did win the vote 48-35 but it was a disaster, a tactical blunder that put a shelf life on his prime ministership normally associated with a packet of crumpets.

Sure enough Turnbull’s leadership came to an end less than 48 hours later. It may have been quicker, but Turnbull played every card in the deck to delay the spill that ultimately saw his preferred candidate, Scott Morrison get the job.

We know all this because we saw it with our own eyes. We weren’t there in the party room. You must be a Liberal Party MP to be there but what we learned is that Malcolm Turnbull had lost the support of the party room. That is the salient fact and whatever external influence had been brought to bear from journalists and commentators like myself mattered for nothing when it came time to cast ballots.

The only smoking gun was the one in Turnbull’s pocket after he had shot himself in the foot. There had been tactical errors and political missteps for 30 months or more but his decision to bring on the spill was the one that would prove fatal.

In a number of articles over the last few years, I chronicled his political mistakes. The list grew large. The 30 Newspolls ticking time bomb, ‘the High Court will so hold’ comment. It went on. I described the Turnbull government as ‘Tuesday heroes, Friday zeroes’ due to Turnbull’s uncanny ability to turn a good start to the week into humiliation, catastrophe and chaos. You could set your clock by it.

Ultimately, here was a prime minister with almost boundless intellect completely bereft of political skills. His shortcomings were evident in 2009 where he lost the Liberal leadership for the first time. His sins then were recklessness, impatience and an inability to consult with his colleagues. When he assumed the leadership again in 2015, he said he had learned from his mistakes. Time would prove that he had not.

None of this is new, of course. What is novel is the revisionism that has taken place since Turnbull took his bat and ball and went to New York. There is an attempt to paint Turnbull as a victim of dark forces rather than the architect of his own downfall.

As to the motives of revisionists I cannot say but I will ask this, is there anybody out there, left, right or right down the middle who thinks Malcolm Turnbull was anything but a crushing disappointment as prime minister? Anyone? Hello?

This article was published in The Australian on 21 September 2018.