David McBride on whistleblowing, his famous dad – and a possible jail sentence

This story is a part of the March 2 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

David McBride once bit off a person’s finger. “That was in my dark days in Africa,” he says. “When I was working in the security business.” At 60, McBride is an imposing figure – tall and strongly built, with wavy silver hair and an intense gaze. Normally he is gregarious, a big personality, but the memory of the severed digit has subdued him a little. He didn’t want to bite it off, obviously. “I found myself in a situation and that was all I could do really,” he says. At the time he was guarding diamond mines in Zaire, since renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On occasion, he had to recover stolen diamonds. “It was sort of a rough job, put it that way.”

McBride now faces another difficult moment in his career. Late last year, he pleaded guilty to leaking classified military information while working as a lawyer in the Australian army. He is due to be sentenced later this month and could go to jail. “It’s time to face the music,” as he puts it. Yet many of his fellow citizens think McBride should be thanked, not punished. The documents he gave journalists were the basis of a series of damning ABC reports on Australian special forces operations in Afghanistan. In a survey commissioned last year by independent think tank The Australia Institute, 64 per cent of respondents said the government should intervene to end his prosecution. “Honour, courage and integrity are still valued by the public,” says journalist and social justice activist Mary Kostakidis.

McBride has his critics too, though. Among them is the distinguished investigative journalist Chris Masters, who believes he is a more complicated character than media coverage of his case has conveyed. In Masters’ book about disgraced Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith – Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes – he devotes a brief, carefully worded section to McBride, concluding with the observation that “sometimes whistleblowers are not what they claim to be”.

One thing that isn’t in dispute: McBride has led a colourful life. Born in Sydney, he spent years bouncing around the globe from one adventure to another, as if large doses of adrenaline were vital to his survival. One minute he was winning boxing matches at the University of Oxford and charming his way to the heart of the British establishment, the next he was commanding a platoon in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He has crawled through the jungles of Borneo. Shot grouse in the highlands of Scotland. Played buzkashi – “a kind of horseback rugby” – with tribesmen on the north-west frontier of Pakistan. Back in Australia, he became a member of the Labor Party, then switched sides and stood for NSW parliament as a Liberal. After joining the army legal corps, he was posted twice to Afghanistan.

There’s a lot I want to ask McBride when I visit him in the inner-east Sydney suburb of Paddington on a warm morning in February. For a start, I am curious about his relationship with his father. In 1971, seven-year-old David watched William McBride receive a medal from the French Institut de la Vie in the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. William, a Sydney obstetrician, had won international acclaim for raising the alarm about thalidomide, a morning-sickness drug that caused birth defects in the children of some patients. In Australia, he was revered. But a couple of decades after the glittering ceremony at Versailles, he was found to have falsified scientific research to discredit another anti-nausea drug. In 1993, he was struck off the medical register. It was a spectacular fall from grace.

McBride with his parents in 2004 after passing the bar exam.Credit: Courtesy of David McBride.

“He deserved what he got,” says McBride, reclining on a couch with a cup of coffee. He and William were often at odds, he makes clear, though his attitude to his father – who died aged 91 in 2018 – softened over time. In retrospect, he thinks the tension between them was due less to their differences than their similarities. “I’m very much like him now, in good ways and bad ways,” he says. “Yes, we’re more or less the same person.”

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His directness is one of McBride’s engaging qualities. In conversation, he gives the impression of complete sincerity. There’s little obfuscation or weighing of words. He laughs loudly and often. To whistleblower protection advocate Peter Greste, it’s always a surprise to hear him described as a former military lawyer. “He’s the most unlawyerly lawyer I’ve come across in a very long time,” says Greste, who is professor of journalism at Sydney’s Macquarie University and executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. Superficially, at least, McBride is also a most unmilitary military man. He may have taken pride in a crisply pressed uniform while in the army but since being medically discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2017, his favoured look is rumpled-casual. White-framed glasses, unruly locks, wrinkled linen shirts – he’s less like an ex-soldier than the creative director of an advertising agency.

Except ad men’s tattoos probably aren’t quite as large as McBride’s. He says the outsize image of a snake on his left arm replaced a smaller serpent he got removed soon after having a chat with a guy covered in ink who had survived several stints behind bars: “One of my standard jokes is that after he told me I was going to get beaten up in prison, I decided to get a bigger tattoo.” McBride is a strapping 188 centimetres and weighs about 100 kilograms. He does boxing training twice a week and runs each morning. “I am pretty fit,” he says, but it’s mainly for his mental health that he maintains the exercise routine. “It’s my medicine. I’ve got to do it every day.” As he pounds the pavement, he is accompanied by his Staffordshire bull terrier, Jakey, who is certified as an assistance dog.

The pressure of being a whistleblower has weighed on McBride for a long time. The ABC stories collectively known as The Afghan Files were broadcast and published online in 2017. They included details of killings of unarmed civilians and revealed unease in the military’s top ranks about the “warrior culture” of the elite special forces. In June 2019, three months after McBride was charged with leaking the Defence Force documents, Australian Federal Police raided the national broadcaster’s headquarters in Sydney, looking for material related to production of the reports. “Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy”, read a headline in The New York Times.

McBride has never denied being the ABC’s source. His lawyers intended to argue at his trial last November that his oath of service when he joined the army obliged him not only to follow orders but to act in the public interest. But Justice David Mossop of the ACT Supreme Court ruled out that line of defence before a jury could be empanelled, and documents that McBride’s lawyers considered essential to his case were withheld on national security grounds. In the end, he had little choice but to plead guilty to one count of dishonestly appropriating Commonwealth property and two counts of communicating military information to other people while a member of the Defence Force. Outside the court, he raised his fist in the air for the TV cameras and insisted it wasn’t a defeat. “I stand tall, and I believe I did my duty,” he said, adding, “I see this as the beginning of a better Australia.”

“I just think they have picked the wrong poster boy.”

Investigative journalist Chris Masters

Like his father before him, McBride is accused by some of liking the spotlight too much. A natural showman, he portrays himself as a fearless champion of
decency and honesty. “Put me in jail, Anthony Albanese,” he said in a rousing speech at the University of Sydney last year, “and you will look like a fool, and I will look like a hero.” Referring to the gameness of whistleblowers, he invoked famous battles of history that were won against the odds. “It’s Agincourt!” he told the cheering crowd. “… We are the 300 Spartans!” On social media, McBride asked his followers to vote for him as the news outlet Crikey’s 2023 Person of the Year – and vote for him they did, in sufficient numbers to deliver him the title. For $35 apiece, his supporters can buy T-shirts printed with the words “Truth is a Lonely Warrior”. To further lift his profile, he recently wrote a memoir, The Nature of Honour.

“He’s flamboyant,” says Peter Greste. “Charismatic.” And in Greste’s opinion, McBride is a formidable operator. “He’s got a steeliness about him. Even if you disagree with his approach, it’s hard not to be impressed by his sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Chris Masters can think of a lot of people who impress him more. While Masters endorses the campaign by Greste and others for greater protection for whistleblowers, he questions the wisdom of making McBride the face of it. “I just think they have picked the wrong poster boy,” he says.

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When David McBride was born in 1963, his family lived in the southern Sydney suburb of Blakehurst on a waterfront block with sweeping lawns, a tennis court, a swimming pool and a jetty. At Easter and Christmas, they headed to their farm in the Hunter region of NSW. Later they acquired more rural properties and a holiday house at Palm Beach in Sydney’s north. William, who had blown the whistle on thalidomide in 1961, materially indulged all four of his kids but none more so than David, the youngest. As a small boy, he buzzed around in a pint-sized version of a Formula 1 car, brought back by his father from an overseas work trip.

At the tender age of six, he was fitted for the uniform of Tudor House, an expensive boarding school at Moss Vale, in the NSW Southern Highlands. His older brother, John, who was sent there too, remembers how miserable David was in his first term: “Every time he’d see me, he’d cry.” But David grew to love the school. For him, the highlight of the Tudor House calendar was the end-of-year judo exhibition, attended by the contestants’ parents. By his final year, when he was 12, he was so skilled at the martial art that he was expected to win all three of his fights. In the event, he won only two. He says his father didn’t congratulate him on his performance. “He just said, ‘You lost.’ Even 30 years later, he was saying, ‘Remember that time you lost in front of all those people?’ ” McBride pauses. “That’s what he was like. It really used to chew me up.”

The McBride family in 1972. (From left) David, John, Catherine, dad William, Louise and mum PatriciaCredit: Robert Rice

Nothing he did seemed to be good enough for William. Others admired him though. The McBride boys went on to The King’s School, at Parramatta, the oldest private school in Australia, where fellow boarders regarded the teenage David as enviably smart, sporty, funny and good-looking. As one of his contemporaries has put it: “At school, everyone wanted to be Dave McBride.” It was much the same at the University of Sydney, where McBride put in just enough effort to get through his law exams while partying so hard that he often arrived late or hungover for Saturday morning rugby matches. He writes in his memoir that when the university rugby club toured North America, he turned up to one of the first training sessions in a red Corvette with a blonde at the wheel.

“If you were around David, you were always going to have a good time.”

His friend Kit Rogers

He says it was his father who suggested he continue his law studies at Oxford. A place was found for him at Oriel College, where the provost, former Australian governor-general Sir Zelman Cowan, was a friend of William’s. The fees were huge, but William had no qualms about paying them. “He was pretty hard on me,” McBride says, “but I don’t think he ever said no to any expense, ever.” Going through old family pictures the other day, McBride noticed something about the images of his father: “In the photos where we’re all together, he is frequently looking just at me, with a smile on his face.”

To the English, McBride was a wild colonial boy, appealing in his raffishness. “If you were around David, you were always going to have a good time,” says his friend Kit Rogers, who decided to get to know McBride after watching him ride a hang-glider from the top of a mountain during a 1986 Oxford ski trip to the French Alps. “He’s an adventurer. And he was always very positive about things. Saw the best in people.”

McBride playing buzkashi (“a kind of horseback rugby”) in Pakistan, 2000.Credit: Courtesy of David McBride

Future prime minister Tony Abbott had captained McBride’s rugby team at Sydney University. An Oxford graduate himself, Abbott had urged him to follow his example and take up boxing. McBride did so, training with such dedication that five months after first stepping into a ring, he was the Oxford-Cambridge heavyweight champion. He accepted an invitation to join the Bullingdon Club, an all-male Oxford dining society that was chaired in McBride’s time by future British prime minister David Cameron. The club has become notorious for displays of born-to-rule boorishness, drunkenness and debauchery but McBride remembers his fellow members fondly. “They all went to Eton and their parents were lords or something,” he says. “But I must admit I really liked them and they seemed to like me.” He imagines he was recruited for his novelty value, but Kit Rogers reckons there was more to it than that: “He was an extraordinary character and I think everyone wanted to be close to him, whether it was the toffs of the Bullingdon or his sports coaches or anyone who came across him, really.”

While McBride was going all Brideshead Revisited, posing languidly with friends wearing boaters and blazers for a photo that could be a still from the smash-hit 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, his father’s reputation was starting to unravel. In 1988, ABC journalist Norman Swan won Australian journalism’s highest honour, the Gold Walkley, for an investigation that alleged the most admired doctor in the country was guilty of scientific fraud. The medical tribunal of NSW conducted an exhaustive inquiry, eventually concluding that in distorting the results of an
experiment and knowingly publishing false data, William had shown himself to be “not of good character”. He was therefore barred from practising medicine.

McBride (top left, with hands in pockets) with friends at Oxford.Credit: Courtesy of David McBride

“If they do lead me off in handcuffs, I want to at least be able to do it with some sort of dignity.”

David McBride

“That was cataclysmic,” says David McBride’s longtime friend, documentary producer David Adams. The McBrides had seemed to Adams the family who had everything: “The famous father, the wealth, the standing. I don’t think they were society people particularly, but they were certainly members of all the right clubs.” From Blakehurst, they had moved to fashionable Woollahra. “Their house was like a palace,” Adams says. But in the space of a few years, they lost the lot. The beach house, the farms and finally the family home – all had to be sold once William stopped earning and needed funds to pay the lawyers fighting to clear his name. For David, in his second year at Oxford when Swan’s story broke, his father’s downfall was a turning point, Adams believes. “When that world cracked, he basically said, ‘I’ve got to explore what else is out there.’ ”

To me, McBride insists the impact on him was minimal. The scandal was shattering for his mother Patricia, also a doctor, and for his siblings, he concedes, but because he was living in the UK, he got off lightly. “I had a smart tutor at Oxford who said, ‘Look, the best thing you can do for your father is to make a go of your own life. That’s what he would want you to do.’ ” McBride adds that, as he awaits sentencing, he is giving similar advice to his two teenage daughters. “I say, ‘Whatever happens in March, I don’t want you hanging around jail. I want you getting out there and living.’ ”

A prison term is by no means a certainty. The whistleblower known as Witness K got a three-month suspended sentence, completely avoiding jail time, after pleading guilty in 2021. After McBride’s guilty plea, Justice Mossop asked that he be assessed for suitability for an intensive correction order – a sentence that can be served in the community. But the range of possibilities open to the judge extends all the way to life in prison, and McBride isn’t assuming anything. “I don’t want to be shocked,” he says. “If they do lead me off in handcuffs, I want to at least be able to do it with some sort of dignity, and that means being mentally prepared for it.”

I ask how much he has outlaid in legal fees. Up to a million dollars, he says. At his estimate, about $500,000 has been donated by strangers – “people from all walks of life. Retired school teachers, policemen, grey nomads: they send you a cheque in the mail. There are a lot of very good people in Australia.” McBride’s mother died in 2021, leaving her only major asset, a Sydney apartment, to his oldest sister, tax lawyer Louise McBride, who financially supported her parents for many years. David, who got $10,000, is suing for a larger share of the estate. He needs the money, he says. When he and his wife Sarah divorced in 2018, they had a house in Canberra and an investment unit in Sydney, but the proceeds from his share of the assets have been spent. His superannuation savings have gone too, he says. The Paddington terrace house where we are talking is leased by Sarah, who has a new partner but remains McBride’s friend and supporter. At her invitation, he is staying here, splitting the rent, while he waits to learn his fate. McBride says he lives from one army pension payment to the next. “Yeah, I’ve got nothing.”

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If you were tracing the events that led McBride to this position, you could start as far back as the summer night in 1987 when he crashed a ball at Oxford’s grandest college, Christ Church. Having scaled a stone wall and joined the party, his eye was caught by three young men wearing red tunics, tight trousers with red stripes, and spurs. McBride was in his Bullingdon Club regalia – a snazzy navy tailcoat with velvet collar and ivory silk lapels, monogrammed buttons and a waistcoat. Even so, he had a bad case of uniform envy. Then and there, he decided to become a cavalry officer in the British army.

After visiting a recruitment office, he set his sights on the senior regiment known as the Blues and Royals, which is part of the Household Cavalry. These are the straight-backed fellows in blue tunics and red-plumed helmets who ride escort to the royal carriage on ceremonial occasions. McBride’s Oxford friend Kit Rogers gives him points for audacity. “I mean, it’s the sort of regiment that you only get into if you’ve got a long lineage of cavalry officers in your bloodline,” Rogers says. McBride was put through a series of hoops, including a meeting at Westminster with the then Household Cavalry commander, Colonel Andrew Parker-Bowles (whose then-wife Camilla is now the Queen), but eventually the regiment accepted him. Hurrah!

McBride as a cavalry officer in the British army.Credit: Courtesy of David McBride

While McBride celebrated, some of his friends puzzled over the move. He hadn’t struck them as the military type: he wasn’t a rule-follower. His brother John tells me that as a child, David resisted edicts issued by their father. “Dad was the boss and that was it,” says John, but David was “very naughty … a rebel”. David mentions in his memoir that during his first semester at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy in 1989, he got into trouble for breaking curfew. “My instructors found that annoying,” he writes, but to him it was no big deal. “I firmly believed that being a really good officer meant having a personality that was more than simply a regurgitation of the army field manual.”

As a member of the Blues and Royals, McBride got to play polo at Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park – hallowed ground to the English polo set. His father, generous as ever despite his rapidly deteriorating financial position, stumped up for a couple of polo ponies. McBride believes William enjoyed
bestowing the gift. He noticed that as his father watched him on horseback, “he had the same look on his face as when he used to watch me driving the
miniature racing car he’d bought me.”

As much fun as all this was, McBride grew restless after a couple of years. For his next challenge, he applied to join the British SAS, a special forces unit of crack troops skilled in close-combat fighting, covert surveillance and hostage rescue. He made it through the first rounds of the gruelling selection trials but flunked the final challenge in the Borneo jungle. Bitterly disappointed, he was deployed to Northern Ireland to command an infantry platoon. It was 1992, and the decades-old sectarian conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists was still in full swing. By the time he returned to Borneo in another attempt to get into the SAS, he had a better idea of the ugly reality of war. Once again, though, the jungle defeated him.

Because there were no spare seats on the helicopter that took him back to base after his instructor sent him packing, he stood outside on the landing rail, hanging on to a chain. He remembers feeling so demoralised that as they climbed up over the trees, he considered letting go. He says in his book that he subsequently came to accept that his rejection might have been for the best. “As much as I’d desperately wanted the SAS badge, I didn’t really want to take orders.”

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One afternoon, McBride and I meet for lunch at a Canberra hotel. The steak on the menu is listed as “POA” – price on application. When McBride orders it without asking the cost, the waiter tells him it is $62. Fine, McBride says pleasantly. The waiter heads to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later to apologise for having made a mistake. The steak is actually $68. Fine, McBride repeats, and it occurs to me that he’d have said the same thing if the price were $98: the numbers are immaterial to him. Perhaps when your early life involved tailcoats and polo ponies, you never get out of the habit of regarding money as no object.

His friends speak affectionately of McBride’s hang-the-expense enthusiasm for seizing the day. Fund manager Daniel Droga, who has known him since their schooldays, asked him to his wedding in Rajasthan, India, without expecting he’d be able to make it. McBride didn’t RSVP. “But in classic David style, he did materialise,” says Droga. After buying a plane ticket from London to Delhi at the last minute, McBride convinced a taxi driver to take him on the 16-hour journey to Udaipur, where the ceremony was to be held. “To make up time, they shared the driving,” Droga says. “To our delight, he arrived just as the Brahmin priest began.”

McBride on one of his two Afghanistan tours with the army.Credit: Courtesy of David McBride

At 30, McBride left the British army and started working in Africa for a London-based security firm. He emphasises that he bit off that finger in self-defence, when being attacked by a group of people. “I don’t want the judge to think I’m a total psychopath!” he says with a laugh. Another time, he says, he got shot in the chest at close range, escaping death only because he was wearing a bulletproof vest. (Neither incident is mentioned in his memoir.) All in all, the job wasn’t ideal, and it was a relief to switch to the entertainment business. In a mid-1990s reality-TV show called Wanted, McBride was one of three trackers who chased fleeing contestants across Britain. Later, he worked behind the scenes on Journeys to the Ends of the Earth, a documentary series presented and produced by his friend David Adams. McBride’s title, unit manager, covered everything from security to keeping local children out of camera range. “He was a Pied Piper,” Adams says. “He would dance and do crazy, fun things and all the kids would follow him.”

McBride joined the Australian Labor Party in 1998, the same year his father won the right to practise medicine again. Three years later, in urgent need of income, he started working for his old rugby coach Peter King, the federal Liberal MP for the blue-ribbon Sydney seat of Wentworth. “Being completely broke has a great way of making your belief systems more pragmatic,” writes McBride, who then stood for the Liberals in the seat of Coogee in the 2003 NSW state election. After losing, he qualified to practise as a barrister and got married. He then joined the Australian Army as a legal officer.

McBride was pleased to be back in the military. During deployments to Afghanistan in 2011 and 2013, his responsibilities included signing off on special forces strikes against the Taliban and organising investigations if things went wrong in the field. But he grew disenchanted by what he saw as the politicisation of the Defence Force. “We knew in 2011 that we weren’t winning the war,” he tells me, “yet we were saying we were winning it because that was the good-news message the politicians wanted to put out for their own benefit.”

His main concern was that political imperatives – particularly the desire to avoid civilian casualties – had led to the imposition of rules of engagement so restrictive that he believed they placed Australian soldiers at risk. He worried too that mishaps, inevitable in war, were being too aggressively investigated and prosecuted.

In his book, he writes of a soldier he calls “Beachy”, who shot and killed a suspected Taliban during a hand-to-hand struggle for the soldier’s rifle. Beachy told his superiors that the captured Afghan had lunged for the weapon when his handcuffs were momentarily removed. “Beachy was honest and took photos of the scene,” writes McBride, who had to break the news to him that the Canberra generals were sending a team to investigate him for murder. “Yes, it’s political bullshit,” said McBride, to which the soldier replied: “Isn’t it your job to stop the political bullshit?” Beachy wasn’t charged with any crime in the end, but his words stayed with McBride.

Arriving at the ACT Supreme Court with his therapy dog, Jakey, for his 2023 trial.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Convinced that terrible injustices were being done, McBride worked for a year on compiling an internal complaint, which was dismissed in 2015. He went to the Australian Federal Police, which also turned him away. Finally, after copying secret files from computers at the Defence Force’s joint operations command centre near Bungendore, east of Canberra, he went to the media.

The strain of turning whistleblower had already taken a severe toll. He had given up alcohol in the late 1990s and stayed sober for a decade. Now he was not only drinking too much but overusing the amphetamines he’d been prescribed for ADHD. His then-wife Sarah knew he was on the edge. “I’d have to take time off work and just sit with him, like on suicide watch,” she says, “because I was concerned that something was going to flip.” In 2016, the year McBride gave his files to the ABC, an army psychiatrist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder which, he explained, could be acquired over a long period of time. (“He said, ‘Let’s go through your life and what you’ve experienced,’ ” McBride tells me. “By the time I got to Africa, we were both laughing.”)

He was discharged from the army in 2017, shortly before the broadcast of The Afghan Files. McBride’s initial response to the ABC’s reporting was disappointment: his material had been used as evidence of wrongdoing by the very troops whose actions he had set out to defend. In early 2018 he moved to Spain, where he plunged into deep depression.

I ask McBride about how he resembles his father. “I guess we’re both very driven,” he says. “Have big dreams, and follow those dreams. He had his flaws
as well, but he was basically a good person.” McBride did not return from Spain for William’s funeral in mid-2018 because he figured police would be waiting to charge him over the leak. When his elder daughter, the unusually named James, asked him to come back for a father-daughter dance at her boarding school later that year, he explained why he couldn’t make it. Then, without telling her, he changed his mind. “I thought, ‘OK, maybe I could get into the country and out again quickly.’ “

James wept with joy when McBride walked into the dance. At the airport on his way back to Spain, he was arrested.

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In Chris Masters’ voice, there is a note of exasperation. “Why is it so hard to tell the truth about David McBride?” he asks. Granted, McBride gave the ABC what it needed to point to evidence of atrocities committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan. But that wasn’t McBride’s intention. “He was not blowing the whistle on war crimes,” Masters says. On the contrary, he was arguing that soldiers were being unfairly persecuted for just doing their jobs. It was only when he saw which way the wind was blowing, Masters contends, that he changed his position, recasting himself as the person who lifted the lid on unconscionable behaviour in the ranks. “I feel like he’s stealing the credit from the people who really did blow the whistle,” adds Masters, pointing out that the documents McBride gave the ABC – after first talking to Masters, who has written extensively on Australia’s engagement in Afghanistan – did not inform the inspector-general of the Defence Force’s inquiry into war crimes (the results of which were laid out in the 2020 Brereton Report). “The inspector-general already had the information that he leaked.”

“I think there’s an awful lot of moral contortionism that’s gone on.”

Monash University associate professor Kevin Foster

Masters suspects McBride’s metamorphosis hasn’t been examined by the media because reporters are constantly rushing to meet deadlines. Who has time to explore nuances? Also, journalists feel protective of whistleblowers: we’re loath to highlight inconsistencies in their stories or question their credibility. In any case, Masters himself acknowledges in his book that McBride has done some good: “He ultimately became an enemy of war crimes and helped draw useful attention to a cause he had formerly disavowed.”

As Peter Greste sees it, that’s all that matters. “My view is that whistleblowers’ motivations are secondary to the evidence that they’re revealing,” Greste says. “What David revealed was indisputably in the public interest … He was just too close to it to see the real issue.” That is also McBride’s line. “I knew something was wrong,” he tells me. He just didn’t know what.

To Kevin Foster, a specialist in military communication and culture at Melbourne’s Monash University, where he’s an associate professor, McBride’s position is a little shaky. “I think there’s an awful lot of moral contortionism that’s gone on,” says Foster, “some of it from him, but a great deal from his supporters, many of whom should know better.” Writing in Australian Book Review, Foster described McBride as an “entitled, self-interested, establishment figure” whose elevation to the status of celebrity martyr was undeserved. McBride responded with a flurry of furious tweets, in some of which he tried to suggest that Foster had been paid by the Defence Department to smear him. “It was bizarre,” Foster says.

McBride’s friends worry about the effect the case has had on him. “He lives it 24 hours a day,” says Kit Rogers. “It’s affected him emotionally and financially. He’s questioned everything. I mean, it’s ripped his life apart on so many levels.” Rogers adds: “I think it’s important that people realise he’s a really good man. He’s motivated by trying to do the right thing.”

David Adams says McBride has always been unusual: “His view of the world is different. But there’s a very intact, stable, strong person inside that sometimes odd behaviour.” Adams fancies there’s a pattern here somewhere. “I often think about the crucible of what David’s been going through, and I can’t help but liken it to the trauma of what happened to his dad,” he says. “Somehow it’s all part of the same tapestry.”

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