Peta Credlin spared a final indignity despite women’s magazine blunder

WELL, this is embarrassing. As Peta Credlin’s career hangs in the balance, a women’s magazine has jumped the gun.

PETA Credlin, the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, will not face the final indignity of being pulped.

Talk in publishing circles is that Ms Credlin was to appear on the cover of next week’s edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, which rated her as Australia’s most powerful woman in its Power 100 list.

Obviously, that status was significantly weakened by the Liberal leadership change. According to the speculation, that change meant the magazine may have been forced to dump its entire issue. But Ms Credlin isn’t the mag’s cover girl, and apparently, she was never going to be.

“It is not a cover,” an exasperated AWW editor-in-chief Helen McCabe told news.com.au today. “Or an interview or a profiler. [It’s] just a list. Grr.”

Sources said the magazine’s cover plans were “far less dramatic” than they were being portrayed.

The speculation is a further measure of the continued interest in Ms Credlin, the woman who made some of the Liberal enemies who brought down her boss on Monday night. But a one dimensional picture has emerged of her.

“The whole world is interested. She’s fascinating,” said one fan of the former chief of staff.

Ms Credlin was certainly ruthless in doing the bidding of Mr Abbott, but she used her power in other ways which attracted much less attention.

For months, Ms Credlin stayed in contact with Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris, the parents of Mo, Evie and Otis, the 12, 10 and eight year old Australian children who died when MH17 was shot down over Ukraine.

Mo, Evie and Otis Maslin died in the MH17 air disaster.

She never met them, but talked to the grieving couple by email, doing what she could to help them. The couple decided to establish the Mo, Evie and Otis Foundation to deal with dyslexia in young people. Otis suffered from it. Ms Credlin was quick to assist.

She donated the $20,000 she won in a defamation case against Fairfax Media to the foundation. And she persuaded organisers of the Federal Press Gallery Mid Winter Ball to include the foundation on a list of charity beneficiaries. This produced $35,000, which Ms Credlin passed on to Mr Maslin and Ms Norris.

At this point, she still had not met them, and her assistance was not widely known. But it was a stark counterpoint to the public image of the hard-hearted Abbott gatekeeper, whom new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is unlikely to keep in his office.

Tony Abbott meanwhile, has been conspicuous in his absence, failing to make an appearance in Question Time yesterday, and making no other statement beyond his “treachery” concession speech.

However, it has been revealed US President Barack Obama phoned him this morning to thank him for his service and commend his leadership in the fight against Islamic State extremists.

The US leader told Mr Abbott he’d been a very good “mate” on many important issues.

Peta Credlin in the House.

PETA CREDLIN’S SECRET BATTLE

In 2013, Ms Credlin spoke to another women’s magazine, Marie Claire, about her efforts to have a child through IVF with her husband, Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane.

She told the magazine Mr Abbott was incredibly supportive of her fertility treatments and said his views on abortion, contraception and IVF were far more balanced than many people believe. She also spoke about how tough it was turning up to work when she had just recovered from a fifth “failed” IVF cycle.

In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, she revealed Mr Abbott offered to “run interference” for her as she went through IVF, storing her fertility drugs in his parliamentary fridge and clearing out his official bathroom for her use.

“He made it sound like it could work,” Ms Credlin said. “(Abbott’s) just such an optimist. He’d say, ‘It’s OK. You’re going to try again’. You can wallow in it. I never want to be one of these people whose whole life gets defined by whether I had kids.

“You’ve also got to dust yourself off and keep going.”

Peta Credlin and husband Brian Loughnane.

HER MOST DAMAGING ROLE

That determination has usually served Ms Credlin well. Mr Abbott has rated her as the fiercest political warrior he knows, and he refused to break up their partnership when colleagues and commentators complained of her style. In his concession speech yesterday, the outgoing prime minister personally thanked her for her efforts and slammed those who had “unfairly maligned” her in the past.

Ms Credlin is a charming and fun person socially, but was depicted, with considerable accuracy, as a harsh and tyrannical manager of Tony Abbott’s interests. She intervened in the smallest decisions by ministers, including their staff selection and media appearances.

It was Ms Credlin who enforced the ban on ministers appearing on the ABC’s Q&A program until Mr Abbott was happy with changes by network executives. That was generally considered a pointless campaign, but it was typical of her take-no-prisoners style.

Credlin wielded tremendous influence within the Abbott government.

Mr Abbott was aware of her unpopularity within the government, and in February bartered off contact with her to help placate Liberal MPs. He told them if they wanted to avoid his chief of staff they could send him text messages, and the woman who was occasionally reprimanded for barracking from the advisers’ box on the floor of the House of Representatives disappeared from public view for a while. However, she continued to sit in on cabinet meetings, which irked ministers.

Perhaps her most damaging role was to keep Mr Abbott in a small and distorting political ecosystem, which lulled him into thinking he was safe and even widely applauded. Certainly, this week’s strike by Mr Turnbull and Ms Bishop took them both by surprise.

Ms Credlin was seen as the chief obstacle preventing highly experienced former John Howard adviser and now NSW Liberal director Tony Nutt from returning to Canberra to help the Abbott office, and she was also the centre of complaints about Mr Abbott’s failure to consult colleagues.

This became a crisis when he took a scantily explained proposal to Cabinet ministers to strip Australians linked to terrorism of their citizenship. He’d consulted only two people: Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and Ms Credlin.

Defenders of Ms Credlin argue that while she allowed Mr Abbott to make serious mistakes, she also stopped him from making even worse decisions. But there was an additional concern as well: the potential conflict of interest created by her marriage to Mr Loughnane.

The chief of staff’s job was obviously a busy one.

There were two basic questions. Would Mr Loughnane ever advise Mr Abbott to sack his chief of staff if that was considered necessary to protect the government? Would she recommend ignoring advice from party central office?

Mr Loughnane is a thorough professional who gets on with Mr Turnbull and they are likely to work together, but there would have to be a few awkward moments, even if only at the start.

It seems certain the new Prime Minister will have a wider circle of advisers than Mr Abbott, including from highly qualified sources who could not get past Ms Credlin, or indeed get on with her.