Annabel Crabb: Quarterly Essay 34, 'Stop at Nothing: The life and adventures of Malcolm Turnbull'. Black Inc., Melbourne, 2009. ISBN 9781863954310. Extract
The great wave of Utegate has passed over us, leaving Malcolm Turnbull on the sands, chastened but apparently unrepentant, and far from exhausted. As the title of the current Quarterly Essay warns, reports of his political death are manifestly exaggerated. When he smiles before responding to an importunate journalist, his teeth make one think of weapons rather than a rictus of defeat.
Annabel Crabb's modus operandi in her newspaper columns is to skewer the pretensions and foibles of our politicians with a deft phrase — she gave us the Ruddbot, for example. So one might have expected this essay to be a bit of a romp, an extended piece of light relief strung between Guy Pearse's distinctly unfunny essay No 33 on the continuing power of the coal lobby and Noel Pearson's forthcoming No 35, on education, unlikely to be a barrel of laughs.
'Stop at Nothing' does not disappoint on the amusement front. Unlike other recent and current parliamentary leaders, Turnbull on the one hand has considerable charm, erudition and ebullience, and loves a good anecdote, and on the other takes risks and makes enemies, generating a whole different stream of anecdote.
Kerry Packer's death threat, Turnbull's sheer gall in taking on — and winning — the Spycatcher case, deliciously alarming glimpses of how the players talk to each other at the big end of town ('Turnbull: If you want to be an assassin, you have to get blood on your hands. Conrad Black: You don't just want me to get blood on my hands, you want my bloody fingerprints on the dagger') — all these make excellent copy.
But it's not all fun and games. Crabb's essay is in effect a brilliant piece of backgrounding on the events of the last two weeks. She interviewed Turnbull at length, as well as an impressive cast of those who know him, including John Howard (whose comments are remarkably benign), Bob Ellis (characteristically indiscreet), Tom Keneally (who has a 'warm if slightly scarred relationship' with Turnbull), and a number of ambivalent members of the Liberal Party — ambivalent not about the party but about their parliamentary leader.
She gives us snippets from an unpublished musical about Jack Lang that Turnbull worked on with Ellis, and some prize-winning student poetry, both of which their author might