The PM has recruited a wife, but nobody knows the job description

It can’t be too much fun having to share your new(ish) boyfriend with the voting public, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s fiancee, Jodie Haydon, seems remarkably good-natured about it.

News of the couple’s engagement was published on Thursday morning, on the social media site X (formerly Twitter), which seemed apt, as that’s where they first connected. Theirs is both an unusual romance and a thoroughly common contemporary tale.

Jodie Haydon and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after telling the media of their engagement at The Lodge on Thursday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Albanese is a second-time-rounder, having been married before (a friend of mine who married a divorced father-of-three called him a “quality retread”).

They had met the old-fashioned way – in person, at a superannuation event. But it was only when Haydon slid into Albanese’s direct messages on Twitter that they got together for a date.

Her Labor background is stronger, even, than Albanese’s – she comes from a long line of Labor-voting public school teachers, she attended a public high school on the Central Coast, and she had a teenage job working at a fish and chip shop. She is widely regarded as warm and down to earth, as was her predecessor, Jenny Morrison.

Haydon is patron of the National Portrait Gallery but otherwise keeps a low profile in Canberra. It’s believed she works for the NSW Public Service Association as a women’s officer, although the prime minister’s office would not confirm this following the engagement announcement on Thursday.

But what will she do now?

Unlike in the United States, where the president has a first lady – an official position with its own office, staff and budget attached – the role of a prime ministerial spouse is undefined and sometimes troublesome. We saw this with the arrival in the Lodge of the “first bloke”, Tim Mathieson, the partner of our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. His presence made Gillard even more of a target than she already was.

The ABC commissioned a “comedy” series on their home life, and Tony Abbott, then opposition leader, made a particularly nasty double-entendre about the PM needing to “make an honest woman of herself”, “politically speaking” – a comment that only gets worse with age.

More recently, Scott Morrison encountered the pitfalls of political wifedom (if not directly) when he attracted ire for two things involving his wife. First was his infamous Hawaii holiday, taken in 2019 when savage bushfires engulfed the country’s south-east and beyond. Morrison attempted to explain his choice to leave the country by saying he wanted to give his wife and girls a quick pre-Christmas holiday.

Before the last election, in 2022, he did a 60 Minutes interview in which he (in a rather unchivalrous move) handed over to Jenny to cop the blame for the whole trip. “Did we make the right decision? I thought I was making the right decision for my kids,” she told the program. “I obviously was wrong.”

Later, in 2021, Morrison referenced his wife as a moral touch-stone in responding to the rape allegation made by Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins against her former Liberal colleague Bruce Lehrmann. He said, “Jenny has a way of clarifying things; she always has.” Women, in particular, hated these comments. It was as though Morrison regarded his wife as a sort of Victorian “angel in the house”, a gentle domestic keeper of values, a world away from the masculine work environment of parliament.

Higgins said later that she didn’t want Morrison to respond to her allegation as a father; she wanted him to respond as a prime minister.

In the Nemesis documentary, Morrison said he regretted those comments only insofar as he “should have never disclosed what Jenny and I talk about”.

Annabel Crabb wrote in 2014 that “political wives … have for so long been an invisible suspension bridge under the parliament of our nation”. That was the year Crabb published her seminal book The Wife Drought, which made rudely explicit the economic contract underlying marriage generally, and political marriages in particular. That is, men have long benefited from the bedrock emotional, financial, logistical and domestic labour of wives.

But women, even those who really need it, such as female politicians, cannot rely on the same. And if they do get it, they consider themselves extremely bloody lucky.

Last year, Anna Funder published the excellent book Wifedom, which examined the marriage of George and Eileen Orwell. Funder made the strong case that Eileen’s contribution to her husband’s oeuvre, and his life, was substantial to the point of no-way-in-hell-could-he-have-done it-without-her. And yet Eileen had been virtually invisible to Orwell’s many biographers. Nor had the author been too keen to highlight her substantial labours.

Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, who was until last year the speaker of the US House of Representatives, is a welcome male example of the “invisible” political spouse. According to a 2022 New York Times article, Mr Pelosi looked after everything on the home front. He even bought clothes for his busy political wife, including Armani gowns for special occasions. That left her free to focus on her work.

Pelosi is reportedly a private man and was happy to be in the background, but that was destroyed, along with a lot else, when he was viciously attacked in 2022 by an intruder at their San Francisco home. The assailant’s intended target was reportedly his wife. The couple’s daughter told the NYT that “every woman needs a Paul Pelosi” but, as the article noted, “there are not many male spouses” like him.

First ladies aside, built into the job of the political spouse is a certain unobtrusiveness. Peril awaits those who violate this requirement, even though it’s often out of the control of the spouse herself or himself.

Having said that, we would still like to see some wedding photos. Love is love, after all.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and regular columnist.