The ghost most miserable
Malcolm Turnbull is ruthless, vengeful, malicious and malevolent. But we already knew that.
By Caroline Overington
Look, you’ve really got to hand it to Malcolm Turnbull. He promised not to be the “miserable ghost” and he’s been as good as his word.
Malcolm’s actions this week weren’t miserable. They were malevolent. Deliciously malicious.
Not that anyone should be surprised. Turnbull does not turn the other cheek. When you prick him, he bleeds a copious amount. Then he turns. And isn’t it something to behold?
This behaviour we are seeing — wrecking, undermining, denying all the while — is not out of character. This is his character.
Turnbull has always been dangerous when cornered, and absolutely filthy when denied, and so of course we see him now, more alive in exile than he was in office, and worse: he’s not only bitter, he’s bored.
On quitting, Turnbull said: “I’ve always thought former prime ministers were best out of parliament.”
Read that statement closely.
See what he did there? Out of parliament. Not out of politics.
He’s not out of politics.
What else explains his decision to interfere on Sunday in NSW preselection procedures?
Honestly, who cares? He does, but only in so far as it gives him an opportunity to exact some revenge on Craig Kelly.
In a tweet yesterday, Turnbull said: “It is time for the Liberal Party members in Hughes to have their say about their local member and decide who they want to represent them.”
Meaning, it’s time to get rid of Kelly — who, for the record, worked really hard to get rid of Turnbull.
The Australian was all over it, reporting in detail all the conversations that Turnbull had been having, prompting the ousted prime minister to front up with Fran Kelly on Radio National yesterday.
Anyone else notice that he started by saying he had a cold? How is revenge best served again?
Anyway, the interviewer reminded him of the time not that long ago when he’d intervened to try to save Craig Kelly. “This time, you’ve intervened to try and help knock him off,” she said.
“It is not a question of knocking him off,” Turnbull replied.
Of course it is.
She didn’t scoff but she did ask again if this was “payback” for Craig Kelly working the numbers against him.
Turnbull said, “No, not at all, not at all” — when what he meant was surely, “Well, obviously.”
She then asked about a story in The Australian that suggested Turnbull was interfering on the timing of the next election.
He wants it called in March, not May. Why? Apparently he’s worried about the “brand damage” the party did to itself by removing him as leader.
Well, he said: “The government’s electoral woes, if that’s the right term, are a consequence of the decision made to change the leadership on the 24th of August … it was a destructive, mad, pointless exercise and the Australian people have been appalled by it.
“The fact is they are and it has done a lot of brand damage to the Liberal Party … there’s no point being mealy-mouthed about it or pretending that that damage hasn’t been done.”
There’s no point making it worse, either, but don’t let that slow you down.
Also, that argument makes no sense. Turnbull thinks the party did itself damage by removing him. Therefore he thinks the party should go to the polls sooner rather than later.
But why? If that’s the case, surely it would be better to put as much time as possible between the decapitation of Turnbull’s government and the rebirth of Scott Morrison’s.
Yet he wants them to go earlier? Yes, he said, because “I’m very concerned (that) an outstanding government led by Gladys Berejiklian” in NSW will be defeated “because of the brand damage to the Liberal Party”.
So he wants the federal Liberal Party voted out to save a state government? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
The facts are this: the public was sick of Turnbull’s government long before the party removed him as leader. This we know because he lost 14 seats to Labor at the 2016 election (the only Liberal to win a seat from Labor was Julia Banks, who is a Liberal no more.)
He then went on to lose more than 30 Newspolls.
Now he wants them to go to the actual poll so they can lose more seats and government. This is not a man with the party’s best interests at heart.
But back to The Australian’s yarn: it wouldn’t be a Turnbull intervention without a bit of salty language. Nobody was surprised to hear Turnbull was telling state colleagues that Morrison just wanted to “keep his arse on C1” — meaning, keep his seat in his prime ministerial car — for as long as possible. He hasn’t denied saying it, despite being asked five times to do so.
Does it sound like something Malcolm would say? Oh, yes indeed. The acid in that sentence, that’s pure, angry Malcolm. So too is the sly snobbery: the Prime Minister doesn’t have Turnbullian piles of money. He probably does like the nice leather seats, the flag on the front, the driver.
Malcolm can afford his own leather.
The accoutrements of office didn’t impress him. That’s why he never moved into the Lodge or indeed into Kirribilli House. The bedrooms were smaller, the views weren’t as good.
Fran Kelly asked him: “Is that what you said? That this is Scott Morrison trying to save his own backside? Is that what you think?”
Turnbull didn’t say no.
He said: “Well, look, the discussion … No. I’m not going to go into that, Fran.”
Which means yes.
Turnbull then expressed regret that private conversations had become public.
Somebody should pull him aside and say: Mr Turnbull, a word in your shell-like ear, whatever you say from here on will end up in the newspaper. If you don’t understand that, you know less about politics than anyone thought.
Turnbull’s interventions are hugely damaging and he’s not done, telling Fran Kelly: “Since everyone else feels free to express their political commentary, I shall do so.”
The alternative, he said, was, “you know, to become a Trappist monk, and I don’t think that’s reasonable”.
That’s not the only alternative.
Another alternative would be for Turnbull to offer as much support to his party as possible, and if that’s not in his nature, do as all our grandmothers surely told us to do: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
That’s not Trappist. It’s shutting one’s trap.
Fran Kelly reminded him about his promise not to be a miserable ghost, “and you know, your colleagues will see this as you being a miserable ghost”. He objected in a most Turnbullian way, saying: “Well, well, well, well, for a start I’m not in the parliament …”
That’s right, because he quit, causing an unnecessary by-election, costing his party Wentworth, a jewel in the crown, forcing them into minority government.
He didn’t give Liberal candidate Dave Sharma even enough time to buy a house there.
This he did despite knowing the Coalition had a majority of one seat — his seat — the loss of which plunged them into minority status.
Now they are in the most precarious position, down but not completely out. Yet he insists he’s not doing anything.
“I mean, both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott after they ceased to be prime minister stayed in the parliament and did everything they could to overthrow their successor, right?” he told the ABC yesterday.
Right, whereas he’s now doing it from outside parliament. Very different.
“I’ve left the parliament,” he continued. “I’m not a threat to anyone” — you may, if you wish, inject your guffaw here — “I’m not a threat to Scott Morrison or anyone.”
Except that he’s going around telling people to do things that would force the government into an even weaker position.
Turnbull has long been famous for his ruthlessness.
He likes to tell stories about his time working for Kerry Packer, in particular the story about a Fairfax takeover proposal that went bad.
Packer threatened to kill him, he says. In Turnbull’s telling, he told the billionaire: “Well, you’d better make sure that your assassin gets me first because if he misses, you better know I won’t miss you.”
It was the same when he decided to stand for parliament. He wanted to stand in the seat of Wentworth, meaning he had to get rid of Peter King. And so just like that, he did.
That was ruthless. This, though, is his favourite sport: revenge.
He won’t see it that way. He’ll see it as vengeance, which is to say, an act of justice. He still can’t believe what they did to him.
Is it possible that he really can’t see himself as others do? It’s possible. Take this example, like many people over the weekend, he posted a photograph of the sweet letter US president George HW Bush left for his successor Bill Clinton on exiting the Oval Office. “This letter recalls a more constructive and respectful political era,” he said.
This from the man who knifed a sitting prime minister.
Also, he’s forever telling people how he’s moving on, yet to the rest of us it seems like he’s in the media every day.
Very modestly, he even agreed, in the first week of last month, to appear on a special edition of the ABC’s Q&A for a whole hour.
He then said he didn’t understand how “people would act — particularly cabinet ministers — would act so self-destructively”.
Let us pause for a moment, sit back and marvel at the self-regard in that sentence. They removed me! Why would they do that to themselves?
“It was so obvious that there was not going to be any upside to it,” Turnbull said.
Unless you count the opportunity to get rid of Turnbull?
“And, of course,” he continued, “it never occurred to me that those people would act in a way that was going to be so damaging both to the government, to the party, you know, and frankly, to the nation.”
To the nation. Truly.
Also on Q&A he said: “There is a media narrative which goes like this: prime minister is deposed by his colleagues. The deposed prime minister then goes off and plots to bring down his successor and overthrow him, and the media will write that story whether the facts fit it or not.
“Now, what I have done is quite the opposite. I’ve had little or nothing to say since I gave my farewell remarks in the prime minister’s courtyard. I’ve had very little to say. And I’ve done that deliberately because I wanted to give Scott all the clear air to do his own thing.”
Yes.
Except when it comes to trifling matters such as the date of the next election, and maybe the names of the candidates, and also maybe where the embassy in Israel should go, and whether Banks is right in her assessment of the Liberal Party being anti-women, he’s barely said boo!
Like a miserable ghost, he’s barely said boo.
