In his own words: Malcolm Turnbull on old battles, personal and political, and new beginnings

Malcolm Turnbull takes the wheel of a majestic old yacht and sets course for South Head on Sydney Harbour. He’s coming last in an annual race to raise money for disability charity Making Waves, but if the 65-year-old is peeved, he’s showing no sign of it. To the contrary, the country’s former prime minister is enjoying his time in command of Southwinds, a 1950s gem so laden with polished mahogany – including a wooden bathtub below deck – that he cannot hope to catch the fibreglass racers up ahead.

All of a sudden the rest of the fleet is coming back at us, their Kevlar sails catching every bit of the 20-knot wind on a perfect day with blue sky and smooth waters. The old salts who own and crew Southwinds – a labour of love for a group of Sydney journalists, architects and other professionals – pause their easygoing conversation and exchange glances. The oncoming yachts are on a port tack and obliged to give way, but it’s a tricky moment all the same.

“Hold your course,” one of the crew tells Turnbull. He needn’t have said a word. Turnbull lives for a game of chicken. He may not be in front but he’s in a contest, and he loves every minute. The wheel does not budge.

Turnbull has such a colourful history of confrontation that his enemies might expect him to swerve towards an oncoming boat just to see its owner flinch. The man who took on governments, royal commissions, media moguls and politicians – prize target: Tony Abbott – has a reputation for demolishing everyone in his way. Old Malcolm would rage against his rivals, scheme for advantage and rejoice in victory with a supremely confident grin.

As a lawyer then investment banker, Old Malcolm trounced the British government in the 1987 Spycatcher trial, securing publication of a book then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher wanted to suppress. In the same decade he saved media mogul Kerry Packer from a royal commission into drug deals and murder. And in 1994 he put $500,000 into one of Australia’s earliest internet companies, OzEmail, collecting $60 million from its sale within five years. (He took cash, not shares, at the height of the 1990s dotcom boom.)

Sometimes he ended up in a dry gully – like the failed 1999 campaign for a republic, when he was head of the Australian Republican Movement – but he never stopped his onward march. Relentless? Always. Ruthless? Whenever required.

Malcolm Turnbull at the wheel of Southwinds during the Making Waves charity regatta earlier this year.Credit: @HEYYA TV

There’s no sign of that furious energy on this sunny Friday in early March, however, with Turnbull happily at the wheel or helping on the winch. Once the other yachts have surged past, he relaxes with the Southwinds crew, pointing out the 19th-century gun emplacements at Camp Cove and Nielsen Park where he played as a boy. He seems at peace with the world, at least for a while. Then the conversation turns towards climate change, bushfires and the federal government he once led. His restless energy returns. Perhaps some of that old fury, too.

Turnbull has been a private citizen for more than 18 months now, since the insanely turbulent leadership spill that drove him from power and installed Scott Morrison in his place as prime minister. Turnbull quit Federal Parliament shortly after that August 2018 coup, rather than take a seat on the backbench. Despite saying that he would not be a “miserable ghost” like other former prime ministers – a private remark made to a small group in New York that September, where at least one phone was set to record – he has not gone quietly.

To the contrary, Turnbull engages constantly and with urgency on the climate change dispute that exploded during his leadership and continues today. Whether by tweet or speech, he throws verbal grenades to trouble the man who now sits in the PM’s chair. “We have to reduce emissions urgently,” he tweeted in the days before Christmas, when bushfires raged and Morrison was on holiday. At an energy conference in February, he called on the government to adopt a “net zero” emissions target for 2050 and said the alternative was a further rise in global temperatures. “It is an absolutely unthinkable, catastrophic, apocalyptic scenario,” he warned, to applause from the energy experts in the room.

He insists today that not being a “miserable ghost” was a reference to those who stay in Parliament to plot revenge – in other words, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott – and that leaving Canberra did not mean taking a vow of silence. “I said I didn’t want to be hanging around looking like someone waiting to trip up their successor,” Turnbull tells me. “I’m sure Morrison would be gratified if every day I went out and said what a wonderful job he was doing, but the public commentary I’ve made has been almost entirely limited to the issue of climate and energy policy, which is a subject I’ve been passionate about for many years.”

Then Treasurer Scott Morrison watches on as Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg address the media on August 20, 2018. Within days, Turnbull would be deposed and Morrison would be PM. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Now with a new memoir to be released on Monday, Turnbull will be throwing more than a few grenades. Prepare for missile strikes. The book, A Bigger Picture, damns those who turned against him in the 2018 coup and lifts the lid on the personal and policy disputes of those times.

There are sharp observations about the way Morrison manoeuvred himself into the leadership, the way former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce fell from grace after his affair with an adviser, and the way Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton lost out in a chaotic bid for power. The duplicity of politics is there on the page in the form of private messages, stored on Turnbull’s phone, from those who tore him down.

The book begins with the account of a carefree childhood that came to an end when Turnbull’s mother, Coral Lansbury, left him at age 10 to be raised by his beloved father, Bruce. “Her absence crept up on me, like a slow chill around the heart,” he writes. After the bullying of boarding school, Turnbull turned to corporate life, which appears to have been one adventure after another. With verve and wit, he describes how Kerry Packer shocked English lawyers with talk of murder – strictly theoretical, of course – and US President Donald Trump bemused fellow leaders at a global summit by asking Turnbull how he kept Packer out of jail.

In between the extraordinary highs he tells of the biggest lows, describing in detail for the first time the depression that took hold of him a decade ago, when he felt humiliated and alone, discarded by his party in the leadership spill of December 2009.

A natural raconteur as well as compulsive note-taker, Turnbull fills almost 700 pages with anecdotes from a life that’s spanned law, banking and politics, including a sly reference to Abbott and his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin. “Peta has always strongly denied that she and Tony were lovers,” he writes. “But if they were, that would have been the most unremarkable aspect of their friendship.”

He tells of Abbott being asleep on a lounge, after dinner and wine with friends, when he should have been in Parliament to vote on an economic stimulus. He recounts Morrison’s briefings to favoured journalists during his time as treasurer, while Finance Minister Mathias Cormann vents his frustration at the damage: “We have a Treasurer problem.” He describes former resources minister Matt Canavan confounding EnergyAustralia boss Catherine Tanna with a plan for a new coal-fired power station; she declared it “batshit crazy”. And he tells of his shock at Cormann’s desertion in August 2018 and the plot to put Dutton in The Lodge.

So this is revenge, right?

“Absolutely not,” Turnbull says. We’re sitting in the conference room of his office high above Circular Quay in Sydney, looking out at the harbour he was sailing on a few days earlier. “Clearly people will have different perspectives and, indeed, different recollections. Politics is a very tough business and in many respects an unedifying one, but an account of a political life has to be factual. If it’s not, then it’s of diminished value.” His objective, he says, is simply to set the record straight.

Wearing a blue checked shirt with no tie, Turnbull looks much the same as any politician campaigning in smart casual. In a sense, he is going into political battle again. The book is guaranteed to reignite the rage of a legion of haters – the Liberals who cannot bear his criticisms on climate change, the commentators who rejoiced in his downfall, the editors loyal to Rupert Murdoch and eager to paint him as black as possible – so Turnbull has to be ready to defend every word.

A cruise ship lies motionless on the harbour during our interview. We see it and talk briefly about the COVID-19 virus spreading on so many ships, the full enormity of which is yet to take hold. This is the week Morrison insists he’ll still go to the football that weekend. As the crisis worsens, Turnbull talks to his old friend Sandy Grant, who published Spycatcher back in 1987 and whose company Hardie Grant is publishing his memoir, about postponing the launch. It’s too late: the 40,000 print run is already underway and booksellers are counting on it to lift sales. The book goes ahead. As for the Murdoch media: “They’ll attack me regardless of when I publish or what I say.”

Malcolm Turnbull: “The degree of vilification that people in politics endure, and inflict on each other – it’s a terrible business.”Credit: Nic Walker

Turnbull has more time than ever to do the things he loves these days, not least kayaking around Sydney Harbour from a boatshed below his Point Piper home. He and wife Lucy have a loving family with son Alex, a fund manager in Singapore, and daughter Daisy, a school teacher in Sydney. Turnbull’s social media accounts regularly feature his grandchildren Jack, Isla, Alice and Ronan. He has a beautiful home, loyal friends and a personal fortune that was worth about $180 million before the coronavirus pandemic struck. So if he dares to mention any troubles, plenty of Australians will tell him to talk to the hand.

But few can know how it feels to be thrown from power, twice, in acts of political violence that turn someone from a leader to a has-been overnight. We sometimes dismiss our former politicians with the joke about “relevance deprivation syndrome” – a term coined by former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans when he lost power after his party was swept from office in 1996 – but the damage is real in an era in which Australia has had five prime ministers in a decade.

Turnbull has not told this side of his story before. His new book contains passages from his diaries that speak of depression and suicidal thoughts after the humiliation of defeat: not that of August 2018, but the one in December 2009, when he lost the Liberal Party leadership to Tony Abbott after an uprising against his proposal to vote for the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme. He was especially ashamed of his part in the Utegate affair that year, when he attacked then prime minister Kevin Rudd on the basis of an email released by public servant Godwin Grech, who admitted days later that it was a fake. He apologised to Rudd but the shame remained, and deepened the sense that he was finished.

“I feel at present like a complete and utter failure,” he wrote in his diary on April 20, 2010, two weeks after announcing he’d leave Parliament at the next election. “Having lost the leadership I sank deeper and deeper into depression, couldn’t make up my mind whether to stay or go and was finally persuaded to say I would go when it was obvious I should stay.” He considered a political rebirth “unlikely” but was in a torment of indecision.

Could he backflip and announce he would stay in Parliament after all? He felt this would only add to his humiliation. “The answer is the pain will end at some point: suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary (we hope) problem,” he wrote. “But frankly I am thinking about dying all the time.”

Daisy Turnbull Brown was chilled by these diary entries when she read them in the manuscript for the new book. She’d known at the time that her father was depressed, but not the extent of it. She remembers a walk along a beach promenade when she thought her job was to talk happily and cheer him up. “Now I realise that what people need is for you to sit in the poo with them and listen,” she says.

Turnbull himself buried some of the memories: the diary from that time was locked in a computer file called “Darkness”, protected by a password he’d forgotten. Only when he began writing did the password resurface. With it came memories of the anti-depressants he took – some of them doing more harm than good – and the professional help he received.

Ten days after that diary entry, Turnbull announced he’d changed his mind and would stay in Parliament. His recovery began, but it was a slow climb. In one recent conversation with a friend, he likened it to climbing out of a pit by his fingernails. I ask whether the depression crept up on him, or hit all at once. “A bit of both, really,” he says, talking dispassionately in his office. “It sort of crept up on me, then it started to dawn on me how sick I was.” I ask if he could talk to other politicians about it at the time. “You can’t really, you can’t,” he says. And he’s right. The world of politics makes it dangerous to declare a vulnerability to those around you, whether they’re declared enemies or notional allies. Yet the risk to mental health is everywhere.

“Parliament and politics is full of people battling depression,” he says. “I mean, it’s obvious, particularly when you’ve been through it yourself and you see. Life has its share of ups and downs and triumphs and disasters for everybody, right? The problem with politics is the intensity of those experiences is so much greater, and the fact you are doing it in the public arena. The degree of vilification that people in politics endure, and inflict on each other – it’s a terrible business.”

The depression was terrifying, but he learnt to manage it. “If you have a vulnerability to it – and probably the reality is the majority of us do, to some extent or another, it’s not unique – what you’ve got to do is just be very alert to it and make sure you manage yourself in mundane ways, like getting out in the sunshine and exercising and all that stuff.”

Kayaking on Sydney Harbour with John Key in 2016.Credit: Courtesy of Malcolm Turnbull

This shaped his thinking years later, when he became prime minister. Knowing he would one day lose the job, he chose to stay in his own home in Sydney rather than move to the official residence at Kirribilli House. It didn’t help his image – Credlin famously called him “Mr Harbourside Mansion” – but he had his reasons. “I just thought, ‘Well, if I change my whole living environment, then, when I stop being prime minister, that will be a huge shift,’ ” he says. “The good thing about staying in the one house is that there’s that continuity. One morning you get out of bed and you’re not prime minister, but you’re still in the same bed in the same house and in the same surroundings.”

Depression struck again in 2018, when he lost power and left Parliament, a man suddenly redundant. His wife Lucy believes the sheer speed of his removal made the experience worse, but also notes that he’d studied the science on mental health and learnt from the past. There were no antidepressants this time. “He had some pretty dark moments, but he knew the signals,” she says. “He knew what made it get better, he knew what he had to do. So he had a coping mechanism.”

Malcolm Turnbull with (from left) writer Paul Greengrass, publisher Sandy Grant (obscured) and solicitor David Hooper at the Spycatcher trial.

Bruised by the political violence of the 2018 coup, the Turnbulls moved to Manhattan, settling for six weeks into their apartment (purchase price: $US4.8 million, but who’s counting?) on Central Park West near Columbus Circle, an easy walk to the Lincoln Centre. During that time, they reconnected with a social network formed during a shared lifetime in the law, banking and politics.

Cycling through the stages of shock and grief, Turnbull also cycled 30 kilometres or more on most days. He caught up with an old friend, Harold Evans, editor of the UK Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. One of the formative moments in Turnbull’s life came in 1976, when Evans saw him at a Cambridge University debate – Turnbull was visiting during the Australian summer break – and warned him, in good humour, against going into politics. Turnbull has remained in touch with Evans, now 91, and his wife, Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

“He was stunning in the debate, speaking from the floor,” Evans recalls. In touch from New York, he tells me that Turnbull’s downfall as prime minister was Australia’s loss. “I thought he was adept and fluent and much regret his betrayal by blockheads and the Murdoch press. He was spot on about climate change.”

Turnbull spent days with English movie director Paul Greengrass, best known for the Jason Bourne thrillers starring Matt Damon, and a friend from the 1980s, when he co-wrote Spycatcher and stayed with Malcolm and Lucy for six weeks in Sydney during the trial. Roaming Central Park, he and Turnbull debated the erosion of the middle ground in politics. A moderate Labour man who saw his party driven to disaster at the 2019 British election under leader Jeremy Corbyn, Greengrass sympathised with Turnbull over his defeat at the hands of the conservatives within the Liberal Party.

Turnbull also had time to consider the events that brought him down. Only after the coup did all the machinations become clear. In his book, he offers his most thorough explanation for the decision that astonished his colleagues on Tuesday, August 21, 2018, when he declared the leadership vacant in a morning party room meeting that gave Dutton a chance to challenge him.

He thought Morrison’s supporters were less likely to back Dutton in that scenario than vote for a motion to spill the leadership – an alternative that would have made it easier for Morrison to stand. This is crucial. For Turnbull, building a bulwark against Morrison was part of the plan from the start.
The tactic failed when Turnbull won the ballot by only 48 to 35 votes, leading him to accept, according to his book, that “half a dozen” Morrison supporters had voted for Dutton to damage the incumbent and clear the way for their own candidate.

Turnbull reveals that Morrison sent him a note that Tuesday as the ballots were counted: “I don’t know why we didn’t discuss this. But that’s your call. Turnbull is on my ballot.”

“If Morrison’s friends had voted the way he said he did, the Dutton insurgency would have been utterly dead that morning.”

Malcolm Turnbull

Not enough of Morrison’s camp followed their leader, however, leading Turnbull to the inevitable conclusion, documented in his memoir: “If Morrison’s friends had voted the way he said he did, the Dutton insurgency would have been utterly dead that morning.”

There’s not a flicker of anger on Turnbull’s face as I ask him about that week. He believes his government was in a winnable position in the polls but was undermined by Abbott and undone by panicked politicians who joined a stampede.

What he cannot wave away is the fact his government had lost 38 Newspolls in a row: worse than the benchmark he set when he challenged Abbott three years earlier on the grounds the former leader had lost 30 in a row.

But that’s not all. His opponents claim vindication from Morrison’s election victory against Labor leader Bill Shorten seven months after the spill, a result that owed as much to Morrison’s cunning as it did to Shorten’s complacency.

Turnbull remains “more puzzled than angry” at the chaotic spill. “I’ve seen a lot of craziness and disappointing behaviour in politics, so I don’t get too angry about it. But it was recklessly, pointlessly destructive.” He says Morrison deserves credit for fighting hard in the election last May but believes the Coalition only won because Labor fumbled its campaign.

“That was an election that we all know Labor lost,” he says. “Scott was able to win, but we did not win in May 2019 thanks to the coup, we won despite it. That’s the truth.”

Malcolm Turnbull with Mathias Cormann and Scott Morrison in August 2018: “Cormann’s conduct disappointed me the most because, for a start, we had become good friends.”Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Whose betrayal hurt most? “I would have to say that [Mathias] Cormann’s conduct disappointed me the most because, for a start, we had become good friends.” Turnbull writes in his book that “Mathias regarded Scott as emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy and told me so regularly.” Featuring text messages from Cormann himself, he portrays the Finance Minister as helping do the numbers for Dutton while claiming to support Turnbull.

What he called an “insurgency” at the time still looks like terrorism to Turnbull; he believes the conservative faction within the Liberal Party will bully everyone else to get its way. Certainly the conservatives never paused in their campaign against him in his final year at the top. The title of Annabel Crabb’s 2009 essay on Turnbull, Stop At Nothing, can just as easily describe those who tore him down in 2018. They were merciless. Labor has engaged in its share of bloodletting, of course, and Turnbull was implacable against Abbott in 2015, so who’s he to condemn the brutality of an opponent? Even so, he believes the conservative cabal is wrecking the Liberal Party.

“I’m not a grudge-bearer. But do I want to go and have a beer with Mathias or Dutton or any of these characters? No. The answer is no.”

Malcolm Turnbull on his feelings towards the 2018 leadership spill.

“That tactic, that preparedness from many of them, supported by their friends in the media, to tear the joint down, even at the expense of going into opposition, is extraordinary,” he says.

“Really, it raises a question: if an individual is prepared to blow up their own government in order to get rid of a rival, are they really fit to be in Parliament at all?” Their defence, of course, is that they changed the government and held on to power, even if only narrowly. The Coalition’s slender victory at the May 2019 election will always undercut Turnbull’s argument because he can never prove he would have won. The nagging doubt will always be there. Morrison turned out to be a very effective retail politician.

Can there be any forgiveness for those plotters? “I’m not a hater,” Turnbull says. Really? “I’m not a grudge-bearer. But do I want to go and have a beer with Mathias or Dutton or any of these characters? No. The answer is no. My political engagement with those people is over.” The terse tone conveys the message. Let’s move on.

Malcolm Turnbull at his final press conference as PM, in August 2018. Turnbull quit politics after being deposed, rather than take a seat on the backbench. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There’s another version of Turnbull’s adventures in politics, of course. In this tale, the upstart investment banker arrives in Canberra in 2004 and muscles his way into cabinet within two years, dripping with derision for the tired old ministers around him. When John Howard loses the 2007 election and Peter Costello decides to quit politics, Turnbull seeks the leadership and is furious when his colleagues prefer Brendan Nelson by 45 to 42 votes.

Turnbull harangues Nelson and waits for the party to come to its senses. Ten months later, by 45 to 41 votes, he rises to at last become leader of the Liberal Party.

And the victory evaporates. Having lunged for the crown, the new leader falls to earth only 15 months later when, in December 2009, Tony Abbott wins the Liberal leadership, 42 to 41 votes. It takes years for Turnbull to climb his way back, but he does so eight months after Abbott bestows a knighthood on Prince Philip, defeating Abbott 54 to 44 votes to secure the ultimate prize in September 2015.

Former PM Tony Abbott with Prince Philip in 2014; the following year, he granted the British royal a knighthood on Australia Day. Turnbull says in his book that when he first heard reports of this, he assumed it was a joke.Credit: AP

In this version of the tale, told by Turnbull’s detractors, he schemes all the way. “Turnbull never stayed in the Parliament to be someone else’s minister,” Abbott once told me. “I knew Turnbull would be doing his best, by hook or by crook, to get the top job. I didn’t think he had any realistic chance of succeeding. I turned out to be wrong.”

So many people have been on the wrong side of a Turnbull deal – losing out in a takeover, a courtroom drama or leadership spill – he’ll forever have critics saying he brought his fate upon himself. In this view, the man who did everything to achieve power was undone by his own arrogance.

"He finds it very difficult to work with anyone. His fundamental problem, from when I was working with him, and from what I can see of when he was in politics, is that people didn’t like him.”

Nicholas Whitlam, who formed an investment bank with Turnbull in 1986.

“He finds it very difficult to work with anyone,” says Nicholas Whitlam, who formed an investment bank with Turnbull and former NSW Labor premier Neville Wran in 1986 but quit in acrimony a few years later. “His fundamental problem, from when I was working with him, and from what I can see of when he was in politics, is that people didn’t like him.” In his book, Turnbull says merely that he was sorry the partnership ended the way it did.

Turnbull’s friends see a very different man. Paul Greengrass, on the phone from his home in Surrey in the English countryside, says there’s more to his character than the “pugilistic” lawyer. What stands out, he says, is the “extreme curiosity” Turnbull takes to everything in the world. “He is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met in my life, Malcolm, in terms of his ability to distil and synthesise complex information.”

Greengrass has rarely commented in profiles of his friend, yet his perspective balances the invective from others. He lists what he knows of Turnbull after 35 years: “The fierce intelligence, the infectious and wonderful sense of humour, the absolute driven doer, and the bit that people don’t see so much, which is the great capacity for friendship and the great loyalty.

“If you’re a friend with Malcolm, he’d cross many roads to help you if you’re in trouble. He’s a very, very conspicuously loyal friend.”

“The fierce intelligence, the infectious and wonderful sense of humour, the absolute driven doer, and the bit that people don’t see so much, which is the great capacity for friendship and the great loyalty."

Film director Paul Greengrass on what he knows about Turnbull after 35-years of friendship.

It sounds like Greengrass is pacing the room as he talks on speakerphone. He adds one last thought. “He’s a very great patriot, Malcolm. The Malcolm who is the rumbustious and competitive and professional politician, as most Australians probably know him, also has an extreme and beautiful sense of patriotism. It’s not tub-thumping. It’s about how to make the Australian future.”

Turnbull and fellow Coalition MPs applaud as the House of Representatives votes to legalise same-sex marriage on December 7, 2017. Credit: AAP

With ambitions so great, why did Turnbull not achieve more? That question hangs over his time in government, his rise to power coming with so many expectations: that he could set a course for a republic, enact same-sex marriage and act on climate change. He addresses all three issues in his book and knows his critics on the left will always wonder what might have been.

On the republic, he insists the hopes were always too high and that he’d argued since 1999, when Australians voted to keep the monarchy, that the question could not be put again during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. “There was literally zero change in my position on the republic at all,” he says.

The sense of lost opportunity will continue to frustrate staunch republicans, but Turnbull has kept the loyalty of the movement he once led. When he restated this timetable at an Australian Republican Movement dinner last November, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

On marriage equality, there was a moment at the end of 2015 when Turnbull, as a new leader riding the euphoria of electoral approval, might have managed a free vote in Parliament to legislate the change. He chose instead to honour Abbott’s commitment to hold a plebiscite, even though he’d argued against this idea when it first arose. It looked from the outside like a Faustian pact with the Nationals and conservative Liberals, who’d accepted Turnbull’s rise on the condition he not rock the boat on something they opposed so deeply.

“Once you promise people a public vote it’s very hard to take that away,” Turnbull says now. “It would have been a mistake to put the stability of the government, which had already been rocked by the removal of Abbott, at risk at that time.”

He devotes a chapter of his book to the tortured political path to the November 2017 postal survey and Parliamentary vote. One moment reveals Morrison “utterly deflated” by the passage of marriage equality. Turnbull acknowledges the pain for LGBTIQ+ Australians in the public ballot process, compared to the swifter result a conscience vote might have delivered, and is careful not to claim all the glory. “We managed to get it done,” he writes, calling it the most enduring reform of his government.

The failure on climate grieves Turnbull to this day. He lost the Liberal Party leadership in 2009 for supporting Labor’s plan for a price on carbon; he lost it again in 2018 by attempting a different mechanism to reduce emissions, the National Energy Guarantee (NEG).

The attempt to formalise the cut to carbon emissions, to a target the government had already set, was impossible to avoid when industry demanded legislated certainty, but it gave Abbott the issue he needed to fuel unrest and created the conditions for Dutton to challenge. Upon his promotion, Morrison declared the NEG dead. In his exile, Turnbull calls for it to be revived. He goes further than he did in government by embracing the net zero target for 2050.

“The Coalition is held hostage by a climate-denying group within it, backed up by their supporters in the media, mostly the Murdoch media,” he says. But he believes he was right to try to compromise with his Liberal and National colleagues to establish the NEG with a 26 to 28 per cent target for 2030, even when climate activists dismissed this as too weak. “To criticise a politician for compromising is like criticising a fish for swimming,” he says. “You know, politics is all about compromise and negotiation and finding a way to get to your desired objective.” The trouble for Turnbull, in his epic struggle with Abbott, was that no compromise on climate change was ever enough. Abbott, a political killing machine like no other, just kept coming at him.

“To criticise a politician for compromising is like criticising a fish for swimming … Politics is all about compromise and negotiation.”

Malcolm Turnbull on his efforts to compromise with his Liberal and National colleagues to establish the National Energy Guarantee.

The critics who label Turnbull a failure on this subject infuriate his daughter, Daisy. “The guy lost his job twice over climate change,” she says. “You can’t say he doesn’t have any conviction about it.” Others acknowledge the hurdles Turnbull had to jump in less than three years as prime minister. Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, does not lay all the blame at his feet. “The collapse of the National Energy Guarantee is symptomatic of a broad failure of Australian politics,” she says.

Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, believes the outcome might have been different if Turnbull had been leader when last summer’s bushfires increased public concern about the environment. “He had the right idea at the wrong time,” Howden says. “The headwinds in his party were too strong to put those ideas into action.”

Malcolm Turnbull with US President Donald Trump in mid-2017. While their first phone conversation as leaders was strained, Turnbull says they moved on with no hard feelings. Credit: Sahlan Hayes, official photographer to PM Turnbull

The Making Waves sailing race finished, having raised $100,000 from the charity day, the beers are flowing at the Cruising Yacht Club at Darling Point, one of Sydney’s flashier suburbs. It’s a sunny Friday afternoon and Turnbull is sharing old stories. Standing near the bar, he jumps from tale to tale with a chuckle at the memory of his clashes with plutocrats and presidents.

He recalls Donald Trump’s reaction to the surreptitious video that caught Turnbull impersonating the US president at the federal parliamentary press gallery’s Mid-Winter Ball three years ago. The video went viral and outraged conservatives, but Turnbull swears it did not offend the world’s most powerful man. “I hear you’ve been impersonating me,” Trump told Turnbull when they next spoke. “They say you’re better than Alec Baldwin.”

Trump was not always so easygoing. In a private phone call that was sensationally leaked, he berated Turnbull for insisting on a deal agreed with his predecessor Barack Obama for the United States to accept refugees from Manus Island and Nauru in return for Australia taking refugees from central America. Turnbull’s chapter on Trump is one of the most entertaining in his memoir, with a lively account of their conversations and an assessment that Trump was much wilier than his critics thought. Once the refugee deal was done, he moved on with no hard feelings.

The anecdotes are interrupted by young men and women in the club bar, seeking a photograph with the former prime minister. He takes one of their phones and snaps a selfie in a swift procedure he’s repeated countless times. Hundreds of people are now gathered for the charity to confirm the race winners and celebrate the cash it’s raised for people with disabilities – helped by a cheque from the Turnbull Foundation, which gives away about $600,000 a year to health, education and research.

The stories continue once the speeches are over. As volunteers cook a giant paella on the club balcony and serve it up on paper plates, Turnbull tucks in with the team and recalls his life with Kerry Packer. He is astonished, now, that one of Australia’s richest men hired him when he was only 28 to be his legal attack dog. “That’s incredible when you think that he had one of the biggest businesses in Australia,” Turnbull says. Not that he admitted any surprise at the time. He swung a wrecking ball through Packer’s enemies.

Turnbull punctuates his stories with a wave of his iPhone – he still has the old documents to prove every point. “Let me just find it,” he says with a murmur. He calls up a scanned image on his phone. It’s a faded and torn paper from the Costigan corruption inquiry decades ago, a document that was left in a box at his family farm until recently, when he had it digitised. When the time comes to speak about his book, the facts will be at his fingertips.

Malcolm Turnbull entering the Costigan Royal Commission with client Kerry Packer in 1983. The media mogul had hired him when he was only 28.Credit: The Age

Two confrontations from those years highlight how Turnbull would charge his opponents from the wheel of a legal bulldozer at full throttle. In the first, he launched an onslaught at the Costigan Royal Commission when The National Times newspaper published leaked case summaries about a man named “the Goanna”, who was obviously Packer. In his book, Turnbull tells of the police detective who told him the leak had come from the counsel assisting the commission, Douglas Meagher. This was the basis for Turnbull’s attempt to sue Meagher for libel, a tactic so brazenly unconventional it earned him a warning from the court that he was trying to “poison the fountain of justice”. The editor of the newspaper at the time, Brian Toohey, has stated the leak did not come from Meagher, but that will not stop Turnbull resuming the assault almost four decades later.

The second confrontation was far more violent. Years after saving his patron, Turnbull joined Packer in the Tourang consortium to rescue the Fairfax newspaper group from the folly of its young owner, Warwick Fairfax. Public resistance to Packer’s ambitions grew so strong that the Nine Network mogul tried to save his bid by forcing out those who were perceived to be too close to him, starting with his former chief executive, Trevor Kennedy, then moving on Turnbull himself. Packer could not be seen to control a rival media company, so he drove his old allies off the board. Turnbull’s billionaire benefactor had dropped him cold.

What happened next is the stuff of media legend, even if Turnbull is reluctant to elaborate on his revenge. The apprentice turned on his master in spectacular fashion. With the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal looking into the Packer moves, tribunal chairman Peter Westerway stopped his car in Kirribilli one night to receive a package of documents from a man he knew but agreed not to name. Included were Kennedy’s explosive diary notes about Packer’s plans to control Fairfax. Westerway launched a public inquiry, Packer pulled out of Tourang and the bid proceeded, with Turnbull collecting a handsome fee as a lawyer for bond holders with a stake in the bid.

Who was that mysterious man in the Kirribilli darkness? Turnbull shifts in his chair in his Sydney conference room when I ask him about that night. He admitted to Annabel Crabb, in her 2009 essay, that he handed the documents to Westerway because he thought Packer was out to get him. “Kerry got a bit out of control at that time,” he told Crabb. “He told me he’d kill me.”

Yet he hedges now. “A lot of this is lost in the mist of time,” he says in our interview. “I had a discussion with Westerway at that time but I don’t believe I gave him the Trevor diaries. In fact, I don’t think I’d actually seen them at that point. Anyway, the bottom line is what I said to Annabel related to some threats Kerry made against me, which I deeply regretted having recounted, and I resolved I wouldn’t repeat.”

His voice trails off and he sits in silence for a moment as he scrolls through his phone looking for something. He murmurs to himself. Soon he’s out of his chair and out of the room, leaving me to contemplate the distant harbour. He returns with a battered laptop and sits thoughtfully in a search through the past. “Just give me one second,” he says.

It takes minutes but he finds it: a letter from November 25, 1991, that shows Kennedy sent the diary notes to the tribunal in response to a subpoena. “I can’t recall what went on in that meeting with Westerway. The most that I could have done was encourage him to subpoena the diary. It was a very fraught time.”

He’s kept his vow of silence on parts of these events. Turnbull does not recount Packer’s threat in his book, nor the meeting with Westerway.

But this was where Malcolm Turnbull double-crossed Kerry Packer, I tell him in his office. That’s basically what he did. “Well, that’s not right,” Turnbull says. “I tried to persuade him not to sack Trevor, I thought it was insane – just completely insane. And then he turned on me. As I say in the book, madness is not limited to politics.”

And the lesson was you will defend yourself?

“Totally.”

Malcolm Turnbull, with daughter Daisy and granddaughter Alice, says he will continue to speak up about climate change: “The Coalition is held hostage by a climate-denying group within it, backed up by their supporters in the media,” he says.Credit: Tim Bauer

A small girl is playing in a park with pieces of bark in her hand, collecting pretend money for the imaginary cakes she’s selling on a table-sized block of Sydney sandstone. Alice, aged 3½, is doing brisk business with her grandparents, Malcolm and Lucy, but suddenly she changes the game. The ground beneath their feet becomes a lake they need to cross, their only route along the sandstone blocks. Alice looks at Turnbull. The former prime minister hops obediently from rock to rock.

It’s a weekday in early March and Daisy has collected Alice from childcare. Time in the park with the grandchildren is easier now that Turnbull has left politics, and it seems easier again when the COVID-19 virus forces Malcolm and Lucy to cancel their overseas travel. They do not know it, but this is one of the last times for a while that the older generation will play with the youngest. Alice crunches a green apple and brushes sand off the see-saw, cross at the mess. “Who put that there?”

Turnbull, famous for being so confrontational and combustible, walks contentedly with Alice and Daisy to pose for photographs.

There’s no sign here of Raging Turnbull, the man described in a Good Weekend profile in 1991. “Humility is for saints,” he told journalist John Lyons back then.

These days Turnbull says humility is about realising you’re not always right – big news for those who’ve been on the wrong side of a Turnbull negotiation – but he feels unfairly tagged by that notorious quote.

“What I was really saying was that very few of us are able to be truly humble,” he says. “And of course the thing about politics is that you’ve got to get yourself going every day in the face of endless reams of criticism. To some extent, some politicians are better able to do their job by being less self-aware than in a normal line of work you would ideally want to be.” Perhaps you have to leave the trade to become human again.

Is this the mellowing of Malcolm? He’s landed more steadily in this fall from power than he did a decade ago. Writing the book was a risk – reliving the coup could easily revive the rage – but its publication clears the way for what will follow. Lucy stepped down in March as chief of the Greater Sydney Commission and is throwing herself into online study, in areas including urban planning. Turnbull is advising global investment firm KKR on private equity deals, and investing his own money in Australian technology firms. On public policy, he’ll keep speaking up.

“The issue that I’m most concerned about remains climate change. I remain committed to doing everything I can to ensure the world cuts its greenhouse gas emissions.”

Turnbull will never stop shooting poison darts at those who brought him undone, especially when old adversaries block action on climate change. He will defend his record, his government and himself. But he has reached the pinnacle of Australian public life and, so far at least, appears to be walking on without tears.

“I don’t miss the politics of politics, if you know what I mean,” he says. “I miss government, I miss being able to make policy, make decisions.” That’s true even now, perhaps especially now, as Australia faces the coronavirus crisis. “Some people have said to me, ‘Aren’t you glad you don’t have to be responsible?’ Well, it’s quite the contrary – I wish I was in a position to make a contribution, to be able to make the decisions, and to make sure we make the right decisions.”

He knew the prime minister’s job came with a time limit. “It’s always going to have an end, and my time as prime minister came to an end, frankly, a few years earlier than I would have liked.” There’s regret in his voice but no grief. If this is zen, he speaks like someone who’s emerged from the temple a master.

“I never imagined I’d run again in 2022. My absolute expectation was that I would not run again in 2022, simply because of age, frankly.” He knows other leaders have had similar ideas and changed their minds. In his case, others made up his mind for him.

“I’m thirsty,” says Alice. We walk up the hill in search of a banana smoothie at the local shops. As the family sits in a cafe courtyard, with Alice pouring pretend tea from a plastic teapot, Turnbull is already thinking ahead.

He voices the constant question of his life.

“So, what are we up to next?”

Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir, A Bigger Picture (Hardie Grant Books, $55) is out Monday.

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