James Campbell: Just pray Australia avoids this world of chaos in Washington and London
A plague of political madness has broken out in Washington and Westminster and while we can look, we should never touch, warns James Campbell.
James Campbell
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Every day seems to bring more evidence that we are living in strange times. In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister remains trapped in office unable to implement the only policy he cares about but is unable to call an election because Boris Johnson’s opponents won’t vote to allow him to hold one.
More than three years after that country voted to leave the European Union, the British people still have no idea whether they will actually be exiting at the end of this month, or if they are, on what terms.
For centuries, Britain has been an island of political stability in a continent that has seen every sort of chaos and despotism. It isn’t at the moment. On Saturday The Times quoted an anonymous cabinet minister saying it would take only “a couple of nasty frontmen” to stir up the sort of civil unrest that racked France this year.
In the context of Johnson’s predicament, it was difficult to tell if that was a warning or a threat.
Looking across the Atlantic at the other great English-speaking democracy upon which Australia’s Constitution is modelled, it is difficult to say off the top of one’s head whether things are better or worse than they are in Blighty. A few days ago the Democratic leadership in Congress announced that it would begin a process that could bring President Donald Trump to trial for impeachment.
Much of the discussion of this momentous decision — only two presidents in its history have ever been impeached and both were acquitted — has concentrated on the merits of the move as a political strategy. Would it help or the hinder the chance of Trump being re-elected next year? Will it help or hinder Joe Biden’s quest to win the Democratic Party’s nomination?
The question of whether what Trump is alleged to have done or not done actually merits impeachment has been very much a secondary consideration. That is in part, I suspect, because the one thing upon which almost everyone seems agreed is that there is no chance the Senate, which presently has a Republican majority, will convict him, whatever emerges over the journey.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Attorney-General William Barr — along with his personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani — are personally conducting a parallel investigation into Biden and the origins of the Mueller probe that considered, among other things, whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. In other words, America’s executive and parts of its legislature are now locked in a fight that will end with the destruction of Trump’s presidency or the destruction of the man most likely to face him at the ballot box next year.
That Trump himself is ringing world leaders to personally lobby them for their assistance in his endeavours is, on the face of it, a strange development. Shouldn’t the leader of the free world be leaving this stuff to the help?
But when you remember he considers himself to be at war with “deep state” actors who have never accepted the legitimacy of his election, it is perhaps not so strange.
Like the Brexiteers who see themselves as insurgents against a Remainer establishment, Trump regards himself as the embodiment of the people’s will, battling on their behalf against an American elite that has betrayed them. He’s doing these things himself because, in his mind, there’s no one else he can trust. And who is to say he’s wrong?
There is no escaping that the revelation he rang Scott Morrison to ask him to help Barr’s probe is not the first time the details of his conversations with an Australian Prime Minister have made it into the papers. Indeed, on that front, things seem to be getting worse rather than better for the Donald. In 2017, it took more than a month for his chat with Malcolm Turnbull to hit the wires. This one seems to have stayed secret for about three weeks.
As our Prime Minister listened to the leader of the free world making his case, what, one wonders, was going through his mind? What tone did he strike? The trick, I imagine, was to be placatory without sounding like a suck-up. Did his staff pass him a note saying, “Remember, Boss, the New York Times is listening”?
As he juggled the request, you could forgive him if he wondered for a moment who had the bloody brilliant idea to let Alexander Downer tell the American government, that is to say the Obama administration, what he had heard in a London bar. At the time, passing on the gossip, because that is really all it was, must have seemed a clever idea. Back then the prospect of the Trump administration must have seemed a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. All the smart money was on Hillary Clinton getting the chocolates.
As it turned out, the smart thing would have been to sit on the information. No doubt, some will argue that given the depth of our ties, the Five Eyes intelligence relationship, ANZUS and whatnot, we were obliged to pass it on. But couldn’t we have waited until after the election?
You could argue that we could have no way of knowing that Alexander’s beer-coaster notes would be used as an excuse to open an FBI probe before the election.
But only if you haven’t been following US politics these past few decades. Because everything in America is political.
Next time we should keep our traps shut and pray that our political system never descends into the chaos that reigns in Washington and Westminster.
James Campbell is national politics editor
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