Young man Luther

In the first of two articles on The Latham Diaries David Burchell discusses the relationship between politics and the media I PUT OFF buying The Latham Diaries when they were first released in mid-September. There are some journalists and novelists for whom writing appears to be a kind of therapy. Their plan, it seems, is to ‘work through’ their anger, traumas and personal disturbances on the page, the better to fight through the fog of their own complicated personalities to the glimpsed rays of sunshine beyond. I’ve got no particular problem with this approach to self-help, except one. If you insist upon using art as your therapy, hang the results on your own wall; don’t ask me to hang it on mine. The Latham Carnival in September this year seemed, on the face of it, to be one of those moments. Here was a political memoir that seemed intended - according to your point of view - either as a howl of frustration in the face of personal and political pain, or as a fly-on-the-wall vehicle for settling the score with anyone and everyone who’d ever crossed the author on any particular day over the previous decade. Alongside this spectacle we were treated to a TV talk-show tie-in about a simple suburban lad who’d been dragged, holus-bolus, through the tawdry, immoral carnival of our public life, been damaged and abused, and yet somehow emerged out the other side with his sincerity intact. Mr Smith had gone to Washington, and lived to tell the tale. Well, of course I did buy The Latham Diaries. Apart from anything else, as one of those people (more numerous at the time than now in their memories) who’d boosted the sometime Labor leader in the opinion pages of the national press, I felt some small portion of personal responsibility for their appearance. And my initial instinct was that my purchase was indeed a kind of displaced donation to the nation’s health budget. Mark Latham is a man of great intelligence and acuity, and a massive lost talent in the increasingly Lilliputian landscape of Australian public life. At a time when Labor is grooming itself (seemingly rather contentedly) for an indeterminate stint on the Opposition benches, he was perhaps the only political figure in the party with enough sheer breathless energy to try to fight his, and his party’s, way out of the malaise. And yet the first impact this book makes on the reader is of a man increasingly enraged by and out of kilter with the world at large, a man whose only sources of peace and solace are within the four walls of his home. When traditional medical doctrines used to link physical ailments of the organs with ailments of the soul, they spoke an elemental human truth. Latham is a man whose considerable physical pain and suffering mirrors a turbulent and unquiet mind. Towards the end of the volume, when he’s raging against what he views as the terminal decline of Labor, parliamentary politics and perhaps democracy in general, Latham likens himself to Martin Luther: ‘To paraphrase Luther, I am the ripe shit, the Labor Party is full of arseholes, and soon we shall part’. As you’d expect from a deceptively well-read man, the analogy is spot-on. Like Latham, Luther was a man with a fondness for vivid, crude and even violent forms of expression. (Latham’s infamous ‘conga-line of suck-holes’ line could easily have been Luther flailing the Medieval Church.) Like Latham, Luther saw himself as a passionate man (‘the ripe shit’) out of kilter with the weary world. And like Latham, he was a man inclined to believe that, in order to maintain his personal integrity and discover his true vocation in life, he was compelled to sweep aside all the dust and excrement that strewed his path. These are fine feelings for visionaries and poets, but less tractable in the calibrated universe of public life, or even mundane human relations in general. Those who see themselves as strangers, and who experience the world as a series of intense emotional conflicts with the authentic self, are unlikely to be at peace with their lot. At times, their turmoils may be medically diagnosable. Whatever you may think about the state of the federal ALP caucus (and in my view Latham’s corrosive judgements on it are often spot-on), or even parliamentary politics in general, no one who assumes the leadership of a great political party in the latter part of one calendar year, and then dismisses that the same party as ‘no longer a viable force for social justice in this country’ by the end of the next, can be said to be in a state of emotional equilibrium. As was widely reported on the book’s release, Latham’s struggle against what he sees as the dark heart of public life causes him to be ruthless and at times even cruel in his depiction of many of his colleagues, acquaintances and erstwhile helpmeets. Rarely does he view them as up to the radical’s task. By the end of the book (when Latham is reduced to parlaying with querulous MPs over shadow cabinet positions in the 2004 post-election twilight), his contempt is complete. One front-bench aspirant insists her strong suit is her ‘emotional intelligence’. ‘What am I here?’, asks Latham. ‘The Hare Krishna? I feel like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the only sane man in the asylum.’ In his rage and revulsion, Latham has doubtless traduced the reputations of some decent and honourable people, both in the ALP and elsewhere. (What his hapless ex-staffers did to deserve their various ‘serves’, for instance, is hard to fathom.) There doesn’t seem to be any particular strategy to this: as Latham sees it, he’s just speaking the truth as he finds it. There’s a kind of compelling brutal honesty to this approach, but also a strange emotional autism. Latham may claim he has come to loathe politics and politicians because he looks for ‘genuine relationships of trust with people’. Taken strictly, though, this is the credo of the monk. How many human relationships, outside marriages, would pass the Latham test? All these things said, it’s necessary to move on. Because the Latham Diaries are much more than a chronicle of a soul out of kilter with the world. In important respects they’re also a depressing and at times painfully perceptive commentary on the times. Of course it’s suited the national news media handily to present an image of the book’s author as a kind of circus animal, a wild, howling monstrosity capable of being laughed at and ridiculed only because he’s now behind bars and out of reach. Shortly after its exclusive rights to extracts from the book had lapsed, the Australian set aside an entire po-faced editorial (titled ‘Howling Hypocrite’) to the proposition that the former leader of the opposition was by nature ‘self-interested, obsessive, paranoid and a rank hypocrite’. (There must have been a good reason for this recurring emphasis on the word hypocrite. As is true of so many people, journalists in high moral dudgeon tend to dole out the kinds of pejoratives they themselves most commonly receive from others.) It would be unwise to accept the media’s verdict, however. To a far greater extent than almost any commentator in the national news media has so far been ready to accept, Latham’s diaries are a chronicle of a man caught in, and fighting to extricate himself from, a peculiar political vortex - the vortex we prefer to think of, euphemistically, as our contemporary culture of political debate. When he rages against it, both the sentiments and the emotions are ugly and unlovable. But for anybody outside the press gallery I think it’s hard to dispel the nagging sense that Latham’s demons are not all within. For all his extravagances of character (maybe even in part because of them), he’s managed to intuit a reality that often manages to escape calmer souls. The political life is not all it’s cracked up to be, at least in part because the craft of politics no longer manages to achieve what it sets out do achieve, either. There are demons, and they haunt us too. It’s true that Latham exaggerates what he sees as the crimes and conspiracies of his opponents, both inside and outside the news media. But not by all that much. It’s also true that he significantly exaggerates the depth of the plight of contemporary Labor politics, and of the social democratic mission that is supposed to sustain it. (Labor clearly isn’t ‘broken’ quite yet, nor is social democracy - however you define it - yet an entirely ‘insoluble’ problem.) But again, not by so much as many of his critics might pretend. Labor, social democracy and indeed the left-of-centre political cause generally are all in a truly parlous state. For all his ungraciousness and cruelty, Latham is not altogether misguided in seeing himself as a messenger who’s been shot. Peter Beattie responded to The Latham Diaries with the splendid claim that this was a book so truly awful that he refused even to open its covers. Lest others follow Beattie’s noble self-denying ordinance, it’s worth emphasising that many of Latham’s most passionate complaints have a genuine foundation in fact. Some of Latham’s colleagues did indeed treat him very badly, right into the 2004 election campaign itself, and they were indeed aided and abetted in doing so by the Canberra press gallery. (Kim Beazley wasn’t one of them, but it is at least arguable that he turned a blind eye to it.) Anyone who had friends in and around the press gallery in 2004 knew only too well exactly how the men Latham called the ‘roosters’ were indeed ‘background briefing’ journalists about the imagined sexual peccadilloes and supposed mental infirmities of their soon-to-be-leader. Some members of the press gallery, it seems, were genuinely repelled by this campaign. (This didn’t stop some of them publishing what they were told.) Subsequently they seem to have attacks of forgetfulness. Again, given the more or less complete silence of the national news media on this score, it’s worth stressing that there was a concerted media campaign in 2004 to target Latham’s personal life and history in a decidedly unhealthy, obsessive manner. At times this campaign was waged in the spirit of intense political partisanship; at others, it seems, purely for sport; at others again it was given an entirely spurious patina of feminist rectitude. People whose emotional wounds had made them vindictive and unreliable were treated as documentary character-witnesses, and obscure implications that Latham had been a ‘bad husband’ were taken as evidence of a violent marital disposition, without the slightest concern for evidence. As it happens, a similarly high-minded campaign was waged - apparently with no political motives at all, but simply for the sport of it - against former NSW opposition leader, John Brogden, a few months later. NSW readers may recall the sense of suffering Victorian helplessness with which the Sydney press invested the fate of one female tabloid journalist whom a tipsy Brogden had tried to chat up in a bar. (The Sydney Morning Herald hoisted its petticoats and labelled Brogden a ‘sexual predator’.) Nowadays it’s assumed this disingenuous moralising is simply a cross modern politicians have to bear. Rightly or wrongly, Latham did not. He’s by nature a pugilist, and he punched back. I remember that campaign myself. A couple of weeks after Latham’s accession to the leadership, in late 2003, I received a curious phone call from a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. There was something decidedly nervy and disingenuous about her telephone manner. But I’m no politician, and my antennae are not particularly well-tuned to such things. And so I chatted to her for a while about Latham’s past intellectual interests, his general political outlook on the world, and his no-holds-barred political character. The journalist seemed dissatisfied with this line of discussion. But she wouldn’t explain exactly why. The story came out in the Herald a few days later. In it my name was put to the claim that Latham’s extravagant personality could be put down to ‘his pathology’ as a boy from the badlands. And the article portrayed him as a kind of shambling suburban Frankenstein’s monster on the loose, putting women and children everywhere in peril. (The editor offered space on the letters page in recompense, though ‘pressure of space’ wouldn’t allow an acknowledgement that the article was pure invention.) This was one of the earliest in a series of ‘exposes’ of Latham published over the next twelve months. If the picture given in Latham’s Diaries is accurate - though I hadn’t realised this at the time - the modus operandi was too often a similar one. Some ambitious young denizen of the social pages would work themselves into a white heat of moral rectitude. If rummaging around didn’t work, they’d simply make it up. It would be misleading to lay all the blame for Latham’s shooting-star career as political leader on the shoulders of the media, or to exculpate the man from his gargantuan excesses of character on account of the provocations by which he was beset. Yet if there’s any truth to be found in Latham’s claim that our political culture is ‘broken’, the claustrophobic, unhealthy and curiously apolitical relationship between journalists and politicians would have to take pride of place. If Latham’s Luther-like Tower Experience serves some useful purpose, it’s to emphasise how tawdry our theatre of politics has become, and how reluctant so many of its actors are to acknowledge the fact. David Burchell teaches in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, and is associate editor of APO. Next week: Labor and social democracy Photo: Andrew Jeffre