O’Farrell gambled and lost, so no use whining

SOMETHING smells on Macquarie Street and it does not have the bouquet of a vintage Penfold’s Grange Hermitage. Former premier Barry O’Farrell told ICAC on Tuesday that neither he nor his wife Rosemary remembered receiving a bottle of the 1959 Grange from anyone, let alone AWH boss Nick Di Girolamo.

Then, like champagne from a bottle, his own handwritten ‘thank you’ note to ‘Nick and Jodie’ was presented from the ICAC file and the O’Farrell premiership was spent. The Daily Telegraph’s ace state political roundsman Andrew Clennell was tipped over a month ago there was a definite link between a bottle of Grange and O’Farrell. One of Clennell’s trusted sources prompted him to ask O’Farrell then whether he had ever received a bottle of Grange at the beginning of his premiership in 2011. He put the question to O’Farrell in a series of text messages that ricocheted back and forth between him and the then-premier on the afternoon of Thursday, March 6. “Sorry about this, just one more. Did nick give/send you a bottle of grange when you became premier?” Clennell texted O’Farrell at 12.28pm. At 3.01pm, he followed it up with: “Hi premier. How is the grange ­inquiry going?” Then, just over an hour later, at 4.11pm, O’Farrell replied: “Confirm no recollection or record of the ­alleged gift.” So, when O’Farrell appeared ­before ICAC on Tuesday and was asked about a bottle of Grange, every political fibre in his body should have been screaming. But at that point he said he had no recollection of the gift. That may have been so but is his memory so poor that he didn’t ­immediately make the connection between the question posed at ICAC and the question asked over a month ago by Clennell? How many bottles of Grange can one forget in a lifetime, even if it is a semi-regular tipple, which in O’Farrell’s case it was not, and how often is anyone asked about receiving gifts of Grange from their birth year? Perhaps O’Farrell thought he could wear some cartoons, bad jokes and excoriating headlines in The Daily Telegraph, while avoiding ­admitting to a closer relationship with the perpetual fixer Di Girolamo than he wished the public to know. A calculated risk but a risk that a politician may have been prepared to take; except that in accepting the risk O’Farrell would have had to ­ignore the fact that if Clennell was aware of it, there would be others with the same knowledge. O’Farrell overlooked what should have been self-evident. Was it hubris or ego? Who knows, but O’Farrell gambled and he lost.