The Marmalade Files (3 page)

Harry Dunkley rifled through his leather bag for his faded parliamentary pass, twisting it around his wrist as he swiped the security scanner and offered a cursory ‘G'day' to the two uniformed attendants. He was in no mood for socialising.

He considered it indecent for a journalist to be anywhere near a newsroom before ten. And yet on this Friday morning at the fag end of a long and eventful week, he was dragging himself into the office and it was barely 9 a.m.

Dunkley had no choice this morning, though. He'd been on the receiving end of a vibrant phone call from the
Australian
's chief of staff and told to haul his arse into work. A big political yarn was running and he was trailing the pack. Catriona Bailey had nearly snuffed it on national television the night before and the media had gone into overdrive. Everyone but Dunkley, who had gone to bed early and then slept in, switching his BlackBerry to silent as he tried to shake off an exhausting week.

There used to be an unwritten political armistice about reporting national politics – Fridays would be light duties only, with most senior gallery hands retiring to the better restaurants of Canberra for a lunch that often stretched into the weekend.

Those days were a distant dream. The rise of online technology and social media was changing the very fabric of journalism. Dunkley's great love – print – was on the guillotine. Today's media was full of bits and bytes of bulldust, digital opinion stretching as far as the eye could see. Decent long-range reporting had given way to instant, shrill sensationalism, while newsrooms – roaring on the high octane needs of a 24/7 product – were demanding more and more from their best reporters. The daily news now had no beginning and no end, just one continuous loop with every last gram of information shovelled into the machine.

Christ, even Laurie Oakes and Michelle Grattan were on Twitter, feeding short missives to their followers.

Dunkley could sympathise with politicians who grumbled about the incessant demands from the rapacious media. But he had no idea what to do about it, any more than they did. ‘Mate, there are no virgins in this, we're all part of the one long daisy chain,' he'd told a Minister who'd complained about rougher than usual treatment from the press gallery.

Arriving at his desk, he punched the four-digit speed dial to the Sydney conference room of the
Australian
, located on level two of News Limited's Holt Street head office. ‘Hate media central' the Greens called it.

A gruff voice answered. ‘Who's that?' It was the familiar bark of editor-in-chief Deb Snowdon.

Harry tried to respond in a more moderate tone. ‘Dunkley.'

‘Oh, I'm so glad that our esteemed political editor could join us this morning. Just where have you been for the last eleven hours while our competitors towelled us with the story of the year? Even the ABC's dopey political editor managed to file something before midnight.'

‘I turned off my phone. I missed it. So can we quickly dispense with the ritual flogging and get on with today?'

Snowdon, the first woman to storm and then command the male citadel of the national broadsheet, wouldn't let it go easily, but after a few more insults the conference call got back to business and the team hammered out a plan of attack. After a ten-minute discussion, Dunkley was given his marching orders. He didn't bother to mention the potential story about Paxton. After all, he had little to go on – just a single black-and-white pic. With the Bailey story occupying everyone's attention, the Paxton lead would be filed in the to-do list. Dunkley sensed it was a bigger story than that, but it demanded time. Plenty of it, and that, for now, was in short supply.

‘I don't care what you say, I am not fucking going!'

Martin Toohey's voice – agitated and defiant – could be clearly heard by staff in the corridor outside his office. By contrast, the response from his chief of staff was muted, but stern.

‘Prime Minister, this government hangs by a thread and a by-election loss to the Coalition would see it fall. I agree Bailey is a complete bitch who almost single-handedly destroyed our party when
you
let her run it. She then pissed all over our election campaign and all but handed power to our opponents. But we survived. That is our one piece of luck and genius. We survived by swallowing our pride and giving Bailey the ministry she wanted. We survived by putting together an alliance of Greens and independents to keep our fingernail grip on power. And if we survive another two years we might just win government in our own right again. For reasons best known to the sad bastards in Bailey's electorate, she is still popular there. If we are to
survive we must win that by-election. Which means you must visit Catriona Bailey in hospital.'

Martin Toohey hated arguing with George Papadakis because he so often lost. The two men stared at each other as their wrestle for control fell into a silent battle of wills.

The Prime Minister and his chief of staff had been friends for more than thirty years, harking back to their student politics days at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Toohey would readily admit that Papadakis outgunned him, and most people, intellectually. The first-generation son of Greek immigrants, Papadakis had toiled in the family's grocery shop while he blitzed his way through school.

He left RMIT to specialise in economics and public policy at the Australian National University. Entering Treasury as a graduate he had marched through the ranks to first assistant secretary level before leaving to become chief of staff to a newly elected Victorian Labor Premier.

There he had helped replant Labor's economic credentials in the wasteland of the Cain–Kirner era, and developed an unrivalled reputation for having that rarest combination of gifts: the ability to devise good public policy and the political nous to implement it. He had returned to Canberra, as a deputy secretary in Treasury, when Labor won its first Federal election in twelve years. It was his dream job. The hardest thing he had ever done was abandon it to guide the campaign of his old friend. And he did it for one reason only: because the party he loved stood on the precipice of electoral annihilation.

Of medium height, Papadakis had begun to go bald early and now sported just a half-crescent of short black-grey hair. He was round-faced and his body was heading in the same direction, thanks to a love of fine food and wine, and a grim determination never to exercise. ‘God gave us brains so we could make and take the lift,' he would say.

Although not physically imposing, Ministers quailed when he summoned them. His authority was unquestioned and his mission was simple: to protect the Prime Minister and drag Labor back from the abyss.

He was acutely aware that sometimes in politics the best you could do was hold on, and he saw his party's current circumstances in classical terms.

‘We're standing in the pass at Thermopylae. In front of us are the countless Persian hordes and we are just 300. If they win then everything behind us, the society we built and nurtured to be one of the best and most decent in the world, will be levelled. We must fight here because we have no other choice. We cannot run, we cannot hide and we cannot advance. So we must stand and fight. We might all die here but we cannot let them pass. The Spartans hung on for three days; that was enough. They lost the battle but Greece won the war. We have to hang on for three years. If we can do that then I believe we can win this war. But we cannot make any more mistakes.'

The Prime Minister knew Papadakis was right about visiting Bailey, but every now and then he had to make a stand just to remind himself that he was running the country. Though he lacked Papadakis's intellectual firepower he knew his political
instincts were often better and he loved nothing more than those rare times he was proven right at the expense of his friend.

Toohey was tall, handsome and looked younger than his fifty-four years. He still had a hint of athleticism about him from his brief stint as a ruckman for Geelong West in the Victorian Football Association. He had learned to use his height and his deep baritone voice to great effect and was a passably good public speaker. He was no fool and knew his political strength lay in his union power base and his ability to get across a brief and sell it in the public market.

Toohey's path to power had been more politics than policy. He had followed the well-worn track from university politics to union organiser and then swiftly risen through the ranks to lead the oldest right-wing union in the country: the Australian Workers' Union.

Pre-selection for a safe Labor seat followed, but as he neared the top he was forced to make a dreadful choice: continue to support a good mate as Labor leader, and undoubtedly be led to defeat again; or throw in his lot with Catriona Bailey and possibly win office.

Bailey did not have the Caucus base to take the leadership on her own and neither did Toohey. What galled Toohey was that he had more support than Bailey, but she was far more popular where it counted – in the electorate.

There is an old saying in Australian politics: the very worst day in government is better than the very best in opposition. So Toohey backed Bailey, destroyed his old friend, and won government.

For a while, despite Bailey's astonishing personal weirdness, Toohey actually believed she might just be a political genius and
that they could be a formidable tag team, making the kind of changes that would lift them into the same Labor pantheon as Hawke and Keating. But after just a few months in power, he began to see how bad his judgement had been.

Bailey was chaos. She could not focus on one idea at a time and, with every finger-snap announcement, entire tracts of the public service would have to scramble to try and make policy sense of it. As PM, she tended to make grand pronouncements in public which then had to be retro-fitted behind closed doors. Her advisers were too young and too green to corral her and to correct her mistakes. And her determination to micro-manage meant she got buried in the weeds and lost sight of the big picture. ‘She is like a lighthouse and a microscope,' one Minister complained. ‘Endlessly sweeping the horizon and then focusing for a millisecond on some trivial detail.'

Bailey's language was absolute, allowing no easy path for retreat when things went pear-shaped.

The bureaucracy – which initially hailed a Labor Prime Minister after what many saw as the dark years of the Howard era – quickly grew to despise her and dubbed her TB, which, handily, stood for both a virulent disease and ‘The Bitch'.

But the bureaucratic disdain was trumped by the hatred she engendered in her Cabinet and Caucus. They were sidelined and routinely subjected to the sharp edge of Bailey's tongue. She abused and ridiculed those who dared question her, and her colleagues began to dream of her demise. But while her poll numbers remained sky-high that day seemed a long way off.

For two years, the public had remained her best friend, despite increasing whispers of Napoleonic behaviour. Like the time a departmental head had been ordered to return from a summer holiday in the US because the PM had demanded a brief on her desk ‘within a week', only for it to sit, untouched, in Bailey's in-tray for a month. Or when a senior Bailey adviser spent a frustrating day chasing the PM around Australia seeking a meeting, eventually ending up in Darwin, close to midnight, without even a toothbrush, and the PM still refusing to speak with her.

For a time, Bailey's constant stream of reviews and announcements gave the impression of a dynamic government, but the smokescreen would eventually blow away to reveal an empress without clothes.

Six months before the election, Bailey's poll numbers collapsed and Labor hardheads feared they would become the first government in eighty years to be turfed out after just one term.

Martin Toohey, the loyal deputy, began to contemplate the unthinkable – capping the PM.

When the execution came, it was over in a heartbeat. Once the possibility of knifing Bailey became a reality, almost the entire Labor Caucus wanted to get its hands on the blade – she was gone in less than twenty-four hours.

But she wasn't really gone, winning her western Sydney seat of Lindsay comfortably and demanding the Foreign Affairs portfolio as her compensation.

Oh, and hadn't she enjoyed giving the ‘up yours' to the colleagues who had torn her down.

Toohey despised Bailey. But he was trapped. He knew it and Papadakis knew it.

He finally broke the silence.

‘Okay, I'll go,' he seethed. ‘But I'm not taking flowers.'

‘That's fine, I will,' said Papadakis.

And he swept out of the room, victorious.