NSW ICAC turmoil: Gladys Berejiklian is guilty – of falling for a bloke called Daryl Maguire

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian outside Parliament House in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture: Joel Carrett

Gladys Berejiklian was punching below her weight.

She’s a smart woman, so what on earth was she doing with a chump like Daryl Maguire? She could do so much better.

Imagine losing it all for somebody like Daryl. For anyone called Daryl.

This is just some of the sophisticated analysis to which NSW voters have been exposed since the Premier’s affair was, well, the same: exposed.

And while it’s all very entertaining, it’s also quite beside the point. Berejiklian is a capable, ­intelligent premier who has handled the pandemic superbly. Should she now lose her job? Her position is simple: she is saying she shouldn’t have to resign ­because she hasn’t done anything wrong. Her critics are saying she should nonetheless resign ­because she made an error of judgment in dating a Daryl. Or this Daryl, anyway.

This actually makes no sense. ICAC doesn’t have the Premier in its sights.

They’ve had their fun, of course, releasing private text messages between the two.

Where ­exactly is the probative value in knowing the nicknames they had for each other? There is none. It’s just sport and, OK, you’re going to get a bit of that ­because we’re all so weird about politicians having sex. They couldn’t otherwise lay a glove on her.

In the meantime, people are saying: OK, but what about the ministerial code of conduct?

Under the code, ministers must declare the financial interests of their family members, and “any person with whom the minister is in an intimate personal ­relationship”.

Does that mean any person that anyone has sex with, or goes out with, ever?

No, it means intimate personal partnerships where there’s ­mutual dealing on things like housing, income, investments, and so on. The NSW Premier has her own house. She has her own job. She keeps her own bank ­accounts.

She never lived in Wagga, and her work ethic suggests she doesn’t get there very often.

From this distance, it looks like they dated, and she had hopes for it. They’d known each other a long time, and she really liked him. But it never really grew legs. And then, after he had to sack himself from the NSW parliament in 2018, she kept on being nice to him, and maybe even seeing him when she could, because she felt a bit sorry for him, having lost his job, and being divorced, and being called Daryl.

This she has to declare to all and sundry? As far as we know, she didn’t even tell her own ­family.

OK then, what about the one tapped call in which he tells her about a deal he’s doing, and she says: “I don’t need to know about that bit.”

This, we are told, doesn’t look good. In fact, we have no idea what her statement means. She says she was shutting down yet another boring conversation about how much money he might one day make.

And now let’s look at the bigger picture. In depression-heavy Victoria, meanwhile, you’ve got nearly 800 dead and hundreds of thousands of jobs gone. You’ve got lockdown targets that can never be met. You’ve got doctors and human rights lawyers pleading a human rights case to a stony man in a North Face jacket who has failed on every front, and he’s still got his job.

Back in NSW, constituents have the smartest, and most ­capable, leader in the country, held in high esteem across the political spectrum, a woman who is calm, and capable, and brilliant, a ­frankly terrific Premier, and yet the pressure is on her, not him?

How can that be? Well, the narrative taking hold is somewhat convoluted, but it goes a bit like this: she made a poor choice in her love life, and therefore she should lose her job, because otherwise aren’t we holding her to a different standard, ie: treating her like a silly little girl who lost her head when she lost her heart?

No.

We treat her like an adult by holding her to the code, of which she’s not in breach.