Oh, dear. Here we are again, threading our way back through the goat tracks of the strangest story in contemporary political memory, finding fresh freakishness along the way.
Malcolm Turnbull, as ever, is not proving easy. He is a creature of contradictions. Charming and persuasive, yet aggressive sometimes to the point of brutality. Disarmingly frank at times, and given to silly fibs at others.
On one hand, it’s hard not to feel sorry for Turnbull. He took a hot tip from a trusted source, a seemingly unimpeachable senior Treasury official throwing himself at the Opposition. How was Turnbull to know, back then, that Godwin Grech was about to detonate a colossal exploding Havana?
On the other hand, natural human empathy for Turnbull is embarrassed into submission by the operatic scope of his self-pity. During yesterday’s press conference in Sydney, Turnbull blamed his current circumstances on Grech, Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan and the media.
His is the outrage of a man who, on his way home from work, is beckoned into a brothel by a mettlesome madam, and six weeks later finds himself being done for solicitation. ‘‘Godwin Grech came to us!’’ Turnbull must have insisted at least 10 times during the press conference.
And it seems amply proven that Grech did seek out the Opposition on this one, but the Opposition did a fair old dissembling all its own. Eric Abetz read out theatrically in the Senate estimates inquiry an email he said was passed to him by ‘‘a journalist’’, when he knew the man he was questioning had shown him the very same email just a week earlier.
Malcolm Turnbull told Alan Jones the first the Opposition saw of the email’s exact wording was in the newspaper, when he had handled the thing himself and taken ‘‘an abbreviated note’’ of its contents.
Turnbull now blames the Prime Minister for his low opinion ratings; he reckons Rudd stitched him up by sleazily suggesting that Turnbull himself was involved in the email’s forgery. Actually, what Rudd did was demand that Turnbull come clean about his personal involvement in the whole affair.
Now Turnbull has come clean, the Prime Minister’s demand looks kind of reasonable.
Turnbull saw the email in advance, colluded with Grech and asked questions written by him. He spoke to him an undisclosed number of times by phone. In fact, he effectively cooked up the terms of a Senate inquiry and even slipped Grech the number of a journo for Grech to talk to.
It’s stretching disingenuity a bit far – but then, that’s Malcolm Turnbull to a ‘‘T’’. As a lawyer, he was never a half-hearted advocate, and now we see him, having flogged to death the case for the prosecution, applying the birch with equal gusto to the flanks of his own defence.
I’m not sure he is ever going to be prime minister, but I definitely want him on side when I next get audited by the Tax Office.
What of Turnbull’s insistence that OzCar was a scheme rotten with Labor favours?
According to yesterday’s audit report, the only evidence of politically motivated bias in the scheme’s administration was a bizarre episode in which Grech himself called a Liberal-leaning executive at Credit Suisse and begged him to assist one suicidal car dealer on the grounds that said car dealer was a Liberal donor.
Turnbull said yesterday he had not read this bit of the report. Funny, isn’t it, how you can sometimes miss the most interesting bits?
Hard to imagine Swan will have missed it though, given it represents his final acquittal on charges that – as late as yesterday, his case down around his ears – Malcolm Turnbull was still not prepared to drop.
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