Will the old Barnaby Joyce please stand up?

THE country liked the former Nationals Leader far more when he seemed to remember how politics worked, and didn’t throw the women in his life under the bus, writes Miranda Devine.

IT was bad enough that Barnaby Joyce sold the story of his love child to Channel Seven after lodging a complaint with the Australian Press Council that this newspaper had breached his privacy by exposing his affair with a staffer, six months into the pregnancy.

Bad enough that the former deputy prime minister said the $150,000 was going into a trust-fund for the baby boy, Sebastian, with no thought for the four daughters or wife he left in the lurch.

But then to go and blame his new partner, Vikki Campion, for the poor decision to cash in on the publicity, just makes him seem at the very least ungallant, on top of all the poor judgment and avarice.

“Like most mothers, she said: ‘Seeing as I am being screwed over and there are drones and everything over my house in the last fortnight, paparazzi waiting for me, if everybody else is making money then (I am) going to make money out of it’,” he was reported saying in The Australian yesterday.

“If we had a proper tort of privacy we would never have had to do this.”

He has to be kidding. Trying to bring in new laws and muzzle the media to hide his own personal failings is the mark of a Venezuelan dictator, not the once affable leader of the National Party.

In no planet is the story of a married deputy prime minister getting a staffer pregnant and then moving her from office to office not newsworthy. He is just lucky the story went unreported as long as it did.

I preferred the old Barnaby, that rough diamond with a heart of gold from a farm near Danglemah, who we once knew as the best retail politician in the country. The old Barnaby was grounded and real and full of common sense.

Now he’s acting like a selfish, impetuous teenager with half his brain missing.

As Senator Derryn Hinch, a former journalist, told Miranda Live, once you’ve sold your story to the media, they “own” you. There’s no privacy tort to fix that.