You’d have trouble selling tickets to this slight entertainment.
If it were a movie, even the trailer would struggle.
It began with a not-very-burning question: would it be Angus Taylor or Andrew “Tasty” Hastie as lead thespian?
Oh, no need to hold your breath. It’s Angus. It was settled days ago at a meeting that was so secret a photographer was on hand to get the publicity pictures.
Would Angus, the chosen, storm the ramparts to rip down Sussan Ley, the Liberal Party’s first female leader?
Not quite right away. He dithered until after the commercial TV news shows were finished and half the first editions of the tabloids were put to bed on Wednesday.
And then he merely resigned from the frontbench. No declaration of an actual challenge. Not worth the term “tease”, really.
A Sydney tabloid editor hurried out a front page with the screaming headline “No Gus, No Glory”.
It was supposed to be a play on Angus’s not-quite-stated warning that the Liberal Party was finished without him as leader.
“No Gus, No Glory”, however, looked very unkind splashed across a picture of said Gus trying to look awfully determined before saying not very much at all.
And so the nation nodded off for the night, to awaken to news that Claire Chandler and Matt O’Sullivan had resigned from their portfolios to throw their support behind Angus. Claire and Matt? Didn’t ring a lot of bells.
Over the next few hours, a couple of those described as “Liberal heavyweights” – Jonno Duniam and James Paterson – quit the frontbench and Angus finally declared his hand.
He did so via an Instagram video. How very modern of him, and the challenge was under way in a desultory sort of manner. “Fantastic. Great move. Well done, Angus” giggled the social media universe.
Sussan hit back, if we can all call it that, with a social media post of her own, declaring “we will take the pressure off families, fix the budget and keep Australia safe”.
Oh, and she chose an old Labor slogan as her own. “Ease the squeeze”, last used in 2004 to prop up, ahem, Mark Latham’s losing election campaign. Splendid.
A meeting is now to be held on Friday to settle Sussan and Angus’s destiny.
In the great tradition of leadership showdowns, you’d feel sympathy for the publicity team trying to drum up excitement for this one.
Would anyone blame the audience for pining for the days when a leadership blockbuster involved contestants more assertive than Monty Python’s farcical King Arthur who, planning to storm a French-held castle, found himself repelled by the deathless insult: “I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”?
Back in the days of properly captivating challenges, Paul Keating told Bob Hawke to his face that he was coming for him, and when he failed, blithely declared “I wanted his job and I tried to take it off him – it’s as simple as that. The fact is, I only had one shot in the locker and I fired it.”
In fact, he had another shot in his ammunition locker, which duly brought down Hawke six months later after events spooled out like a ripping adventure movie, day after day, night after night.
John Howard, a veteran of skirmishes with Andrew Peacock in the 1980s, barely had to challenge for the leadership in 1995. The hapless Alexander Downer had already brought the house down around his own curly head with a series of howlers.
Downer and Howard simply sat down for a meal and, one assumes, a nice red or two, at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Club (spookily, the very place Tasty Hastie chose to stay last week before folding to Angus) and agreed it was time for Lazarus Howard to rise from the dead.
Among the more spectacular efforts, very nearly worthy of an Oscar in the stuntman section, was that of Simon Crean in 2013.
Crean, himself a veteran of leadership fandangos, decided it was time to shock Labor into dispensing with Julia Gillard and re-installing Kevin Rudd, who, furious at his own previous unseating, had spent the time since so undermining Gillard she was barely standing.
Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
