Reason behind unhinged attacks

EVEN by Mark Latham’s unpredictable standards, his sudden switch from chief taunter to staunch defender of Julia Gillard, in the second half of 2012, was ­remarkable.

Sure, we knew his hat­red for Kevin Rudd was pathological compared with his mere dislike of Gillard. Still, in an Australian Fin­ancial Review column in 2009 he leaked private emails from Gillard to demonstrate her double-dealing and portray her as the “great chameleon” of politics. During the 2010 election, reporting for the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes, Latham infamously and aggressively confronted her at Brisbane’s Ekka show.

In April 2012, Latham told Sky Newsthat Laborneeded to dump Gillard and take a “non-liar” to the next election.

Yet suddenly, from August 2012, Latham started defending the then prime minister, primarily by attacking any journalist who took the Australian Workers Union scandal seriously.

Even though Latham’s own newspaper, the AFR, was running extensive investigative pieces on the affair, he turned his sights prim­arily on The Australian. He claimed to be defending the integrity of journalism; exposing a “smear” against Gillard.

On Sky News’s PM Live in Nov­ember 2012, he was primed for an orchestrated attack on me — even though I had only written a comment piece. “You’re a Liberal who’s trying to do in Gillard,” he poked, as he tried to mount a detailed defence of Gillard.

“I am making allegations against you pal, you’re in this up to your neck and you’re wrong.”

It was unhinged, classic Latham, and just one of many attacks he has launched at me and this paper. Yet the crux of today’s story, revealed initially by Grace Collier and researched primarily by Sharri Markson (while they endured his customary bullying) is that Latham’s change of heart over Gillard coincides with when her office reached out to him.

Then, as he now admits, Latham began confiding in Gillard’s communications director, John McTernan. Yet this is something he specifically denied, in print, in his AFR column last month.