I have often written that Costello is an impatient, lazy, sometimes drunken man of large talent and smugness and verbal wit who believed always that he did not need to lift a phone or shout a drink or collude a policy double-shuffle to be elected Leader and so become Prime Minister. His closest lifelong comrade-in-arms and ideological bedfellow Michael Kroger seems now to share this view.
‘I’m at my wit’s end with Peter,’ he told Jon Faine. ‘He could have been Prime Minister… now for five years he’s been like a bear with a terribly sore head … attacking everyone. Lunch with Peter is an agony. It’s a nightmare. You sit and listen to him unload on Howard … He doesn’t like Hewson, he doesn’t like Turnbull, he has never been all that friendly with my former father-in-law, the great Andrew Peacock … he doesn’t like Alexander Downer .. and he’s been publicly critical of Tony Abbott, calling him a DLP stooge and an economic illiterate … he was a Rhodes Scholar, for God’s sake.’
This is the equivalent of Chifley bagging Curtin, and it may go back a fair way to, say, when Kroger married Ann, the daughter of Costello’s factional enemy Peacock, ally of his sworn foe Kennett, a betrayal, surely, of the blood-brothers oath they swore as boys to take over the country, Kroger as a Liberal, Costello as Labor, if I’ve got that right. Or it may go, in its present intensity, back to Abbott’s unexpected getting of the leadership, and to the bizarre court case Costello confected against me and Random House, and dragged the nervy, wriggling Abbott into.
The facts were that Abbott took Tanya Coleman, later Tanya Costello, out on eight ‘dates’ (according to Abbott’s close friend Christopher Pearson in The Courier Mail at a time when Abbott was sexually active, wrongly thought he had engendered a child and left the bride, as it were, at the altar and was known as an arse-baring student rowdy and football jock and up on a charge of sexual assault, later thrown out. It was not explained why there was no ninth date.
And it may have preyed on Costello’s mind. And he may have got the case up, despite his wife’s avid protests — she might have to testify to her unbreached virginity in 1978, an unfashionable year for it, and on her wedding night, and Abbott might have to admit the pregnant girl he shared with her landlord — because he had to be free of the doubt, and publicly free of the doubt, that Tanya had been in some sense Abbott’s girlfriend before she was his.
Why it should matter is hard to say. A girl in the 1970s goes out with one brilliant student and then, a few years later, with another and marries the latter and talks politics to both, luring the latter, Peter Costello, away from his Labor friends and into the Liberal Party of which her father was leader in New South Wales.
The usual view is Costello didn’t like being outed as a Labor defector (after his affiancement to Tanya he changed not only his party friendships but his religion), but it is possible, just possible, that some resentment of his wife’s connection to Abbott was at the heart of it. As I said on the court house steps that week, ‘I myself would not humiliate my wife in public for even a million dollars, but tastes vary’; and it was widely thought then (by, for instance, Kerry O’Brien) that Costello in thus exposing her to unsavoury scrutiny had made a fool of himself and bruised, if not sunk, his chances of the Prime Ministership. And he may think this himself, and resent Abbott doubly for having thus distantly deprived him of the Lodge by taking out his wife so long ago and rousing him into fatuous litigation and nationwide suspicion and catcalls.
Or it may be for some other different reason he lately despises Abbott and says so at lunch, in drink, to whoever is listening, frequently by the look of it. The net result, though, is the preferred leader of the Liberal Party calling the present leader of the Liberal Party an ‘economic illiterate’ and a ‘DLP stooge’.
Can Abbott survive this? Maybe. But on top of the Class War utterances of his party, and the money coming in June to the parents of schoolchildren, and Craig Thomson’s manifest innocence, and the libel actions he will then launch against Abbott and Pyne, and page 68 of the Duffy book, he will find it harder now.
And so it goes.
Name:
Peter Costello probably looked at Bob Carr’s dramatic entry and wheels started turning in that lazy, dozy mind.
We already have The Three Stooges; perhaps there is room for Abbott and Costello as well.
I suppose it is too much to hope for that the Marx Brothers make a return?
I can see it. You’re always a bit sensitive to what you’re friends think, especially at that age, and to have wound up with someone who a political rival has already deemed too boring or a dud root would be embarrassing.
I sympathise with Costello in that regard however as someone quoted someone on The Drum, you don’t want to build a fortress on your weakest spot because it just alerts your enemies to where your weakest spot is.
Look, Michael Kroger, the most adept political strategist calls Costello to task. He probably talked it over first with his latest squeeze Janet Albrechtson who told him to dump on his old mate. Janet is very politically astute.
You know what?
Kroger was speaking the truth.
Costello never had then political chops to challenge Howard. When his nation needed him most in Opposition what did he do? He spat the dummy! He bailed out. He took his bat and ball and squeaked off the the playing field. Years later when Abbott has the reins and the electorate at his bid and call – guess who rings up Kroger for a bit of a leg up? Yeah you guesses it – that lazy useless smirking Costello. To the Manor born perhaps? Not on your Nelly. Get back to mediocrity merchant banking Costello. Smirk all you like. Our Nation does not need pretenders to the throne. Especially the lazy likes of you to reapply for their old job description. The page has turned. Abbott is the boy wunderkind. Let him revel in his supreme victory which will be his to lose. The crown goes to he that dares. Not and never to the likes of Costello.
So be it.
I’m leaving this one up, to show how corrupt Frank is.
Did Costello say anything that was factually indefensible? Or unlikely? Or treasonous? No.
Why then should he not say it? Because Frank would prefer him ro say something else? Because Frank would prefer him to lie?
And would like Abbott to continue to lie about Thomson?
Lie my way or else, it seems, is what Frank is here asserting.
What an awful grub.
Let him now defend himself.
I doubt that Costello had seriously considered re-entering politics… It took him 11 years to retire the $96,000,000,000 debt left by Keating. Now the debt is past $200,000,000,000 and counting. Who in their right mind would do it all again at twice the amount, with no thanks and ALP/union abuse, sabotage and obstacles all the way? Costello would have been a good PM. Before next year is out we’ll have PM Abbott, with a double bonus of exploding Lefty heads as they struggle to cope with the self destruction of the ALP. The entire NSW, QLD and Federal ALP paliamentary membership will comfortably fit in three taragos. They will be wandering aimlessly for at least twenty years. Who’s fault – Abbott or Murdoch? Whatever.
So he doesn’t want the Prime Ministership you say because it would be too much like hard work. And he never enquired about whom he might unseat. And Kroger, a teetotaller, never heard him say that.
What a liar you are.
What a corrupt, unceasing propagandist.
Who pays you, Frank?
Why do we not need to know?
This sounds like a masturbatory circle jerk recitation for Liberal Staffers.
Why would you visit a site like this and even think, even for a second not contemplate that it has been said a million times before Simon? Black hole, Tarago,decimation of the ALP, you forgot to mention Whitlam and 1970 fucking five.