Barnaby Joyce’s flaws finally eclipsed his many talents

Barnaby Joyce & Vikki Campion taken at Farm2Fork event on Thursday 3rd November 2016 on Cockatoo Island Sydney. Picture: Supplied

Politicians as talented as Barnaby Joyce are rare. Highly ambitious, interesting, intelligent, eccentric, cut-through: that great talent also brings with it great flaws, including the belief that somehow he can be rendered immune from the written and unwritten rules that govern politics, which make or unmake politicians.

Nationals MPs have been agonising for days, trying to work out what to do about their wayward leader. Several Nationals, some with axes to grind, others with no axe to grind, reluctantly reached the unhappy conclusion that it was impossible for him to recover from the events he created, which have consumed him, his party and the government.

They know it will not end until he ends it or they are forced to end it for him. They didn’t want it to be that way, but their fear is he will bring them all down. They faced twin dilemmas: how to remove him and who to replace him with.

Victorian Darren Chester is by far the best option, but given power resides in NSW-Queensland and fellow Victorian Bridget McKenzie is deputy leader (thanks to Chester), Michael McCormack emerged as the likeliest next leader despite his inexperience and occasionally faltering public per­formances.

Others, including Joyce himself and his key allies, Matt Canavan and David Littleproud, who have a vested interest in his survival, are convinced he can ride it out, it can’t go on forever and that he will resume his status as vote winner. And they argue there is no one to replace him. Colleagues have described Joyce as defiant and determined to dig in. “Self-centred”, one of them said. Tell us something we don’t know.

Others still sway between hoping he can recover, knowing he can’t and not wanting to kill him, wondering whether it would work if he had a spell outside with a temporary leader keeping his seat warm until the tempest passed.

Wishful thinking, cowardice, selfishness or trickiness will not fix it. That’s what got them into this stinking mess. It is futile to think Joyce can get off on a technicality and fanciful to believe he can fight his way back. Sad as it is, it is over. Even if it doesn’t happen today.

Littleproud’s “charge him or let him go” challenge was audacious. Sex aside, this is not Suits. Key relationships, between Joyce and his MPs and between Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull and a clutch of senior cabinet ministers, either dis­appointed by his behaviour or furious that the good start to the year has been blown to smithereens, have been ruptured. Expecting business as usual if he stays is not realistic.

The stories will not disappear. There is a pattern. They abate, then return with a vengeance as soon as something new is uncovered. The hunt for that something new will continue until his head is delivered upon a platter. Unpleasant as it is, that is the reality. No politician, no matter how talented, can survive that, no government can survive that.

Joyce has trashed whatever moral authority he had as leader. He has gone from being funny to a national joke (the beetrooter). He can’t live that down, or credibly sell any other government message — be it on religious protections, family values, misuse of taxpayer money or even housing affordability. Taking a break next week to ­escape attention as acting prime minister would only concede he cannot do the job. There is nowhere he can hide or be hidden.

Joyce’s behaviour has wreaked havoc on his family. The perception that public money was used to help fund his dysfunctional private life, combined with the unrelenting media coverage, has wreak­ed havoc on the government. Everyone within splatter range has been tarnished, and the longer he stays the greater the damage to the body corporate and to the Prime Minister. Former Nationals leaders can see that even if the present one can’t. Or won’t.

Today there seems to be less tolerance for tomfoolery, not more. Blame the new puritanism or even the Me Too movement. More likely it is the corrosive and deepening decline in trust. Once, we (media, voters) used to say it doesn’t matter, so long as politicians are good at their job. Now, thanks to the toll that soap operas have taken on our perceptions of politicians, we say: can you please just concentrate on your day job — and if you are going to muck around, don’t do it with our money by shifting a paramour/girlfriend/partner from office to office — no matter how good she is at her job. Everything about this saga ensures that trust deficit will widen.

No one can name a single politician who has survived the same combination of events. Even if they did, they also contributed to the deficit. Two notorious philanderers, Bob Hawke and Bill Clinton, survived because their wives stuck with them 1000 per cent. If wives spoke, it was to forgive or stand by their husbands.

That helped voters forgive or stand by them too. But there were no photos of pregnant girlfriends, nor was there a justifiably angry estranged wife condemning the betrayal and sharing her distress with the public.

Nor were they leaders of a conservative party campaigning on traditional family values.

The tragedy of this situation is exceeded only by the sanctimony and hypocrisy expressed by the Labor Party and sections of the media. If Bill Shorten truly cared about misuse of taxpayers’ money he would ask Susan Lamb to refer herself to the High Court because she is clearly a dual citizen and not eligible to sit in parliament.

The only mildly amusing part has been the commentary insisting on the public’s right to know about Joyce, mainly from those who castigated me after my book The Road to Ruin was released for daring to relate the conversation between Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Tony Abbott the night before two backbenchers moved a spill motion in February 2015, marking the beginning of the end of his prime ministership.

She warned him of the deep unhappiness among Liberal MPs over the behaviour of his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, adding that “rightly or wrongly the perception is you are sleeping with your chief of staff”. Abbott denied it then and has done so since. Fierravanti-Wells had the same exchange with Credlin soon after. Credlin denied it also. Which I wrote. Don Randall, who seconded of the spill motion, told Abbott minutes before the vote that unless he sacked Credlin, nothing would change.

Randall’s advice echoed the “change or die” headline of a column only a few days before by a prominent (guilt-ridden?) delcon.

It is irrelevant what anyone else thought or believed then or now. What mattered was the judgment delivered by his colleagues in September 2015. People were entitled to know why Liberals dispatched their prime minister after only 727 days in the job and after winning a landslide election. It is all fully documented in The Road to Ruin — the policy miscalculations, the ­political blunders, the bullying, the weirdness, the dysfunction. Names, dates, places.

It is a sad and sorry tale with a miserable ending. Just like now.