CHARLES WOOLEY

GIVE BARNABY A BREAK

I hope the curtain soon comes down on the Barnaby drama, which is now nothing short of the worst theatre of cruelty I have ever winced through. Please let all the unnecessary shame and the pain end soon.

We should remember that this bloke is not a mass murderer. Nor is he a terrorist or a paedophile. He is not a drug dealer, a corrupt priest or even a crooked politician. He is at worst a naive and (in the event) stupid bloke who was driven by primordial impulses he didn’t have the wit or prescience to control.

Alternatively, he was in love, but more on that later.

Surely only the hardest heart would not feel some sympathy for the man at the centre of all the grief, destruction and misery he has inflicted upon himself and on those closest and most important to him.

Yes, he is the architect of his own ruin but does that mean he should be denied even the tiniest drop of compassion? From what I have read and heard in the last few days, clearly it does.

“Sack him, off with his Akubra and then off with his head” is pretty much the published sentiment.

The cohorts of the Anti-Sex League from George Orwell’s 1984 are rampaging across the land in their red sashes. It really is alarming that so much Orwell predicted in 1948 has come horribly true. “Thought crime” and the “thought police” and the weasel words of “Newspeak” – George got the date wrong but everything else right. It was as if he had crossed the reaches of time and somehow tuned in to an episode of

Q&A to source his frightening predictions. But beyond the prurient national fascination with Barnaby, the badly acted, predictably scripted but high-rating soap opera, I still don’t believe most Australians are so heartless. I am sure a large number of people feel sorry for the bloke, but in the present social and political climate they are afraid to say so.

More than 40 per cent of Australian marriages end unhappily, so almost half the population must have some idea of what he’s going through.

We have no-fault divorce in Australia, but you might reasonably conjecture that at least 50 per cent of the divorced population have cause to be thankful that they are private citizens and that their personal missteps, lapses and indiscretions, and all the ensuing agonies, were private rather than public.

In a television interview last year Bob Hawke told me he thought there was worldwide “a poor quality of representative, which I believe you can attribute to the increasing intrusiveness of the media into the private lives of politicians”.

Life in the big league of politics may be lived in a goldfish bowl, but a politician’s private sexual dalliance shouldn’t always get reported. Unless there is political or criminal impropriety, why should it?

With Malcolm Turnbull’s “bonking ban”, that will change. This is a nervous time for all political parties and no time to throw stones. In 1994, Hawke, the famously popular former prime minister, scandalised the nation by leaving his wife, Hazel, for his biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget.

It was, back then, much bigger than Barnaby, but in the end there was less public opprobrium because Bob and Blanche astutely turned it into a love story, with a little help from Woman’s Day and 60 Minutes.

Betrayal and treachery is hard to forgive, but love conquers all. I asked her at the time: “Blanche, you’re a writer who has written quite a bit about love. Is the real thing as good as the best in fiction?”

“Yes it’s much better, it’s unimaginable,” she told me. “It was always in my mind and in my heart as an ideal, but even as a writer, its realisation is far greater than anything I had ever imagined.”

Bob, I remember, was sitting in his bathers beside his biographer/lover. They were at a hideaway north of Sydney on the end of a jetty, their toes dangling in the water. It was a “foot note” if you will, on history. Labor’s greatest post-war leader, the architect of industrial harmony, the great negotiator, was for once beyond words. He was besotted.

“She’s got the most beautiful toes,” Bob dotingly told the nation and in time the nation lapped it up.

If Barnaby’s in love, we haven’t properly heard it yet. He has not fully declared his love for Vikki, the woman who will bear his child and for whom he appears to have given up everything. Nor have we yet heard from her. Perhaps the couple will have to call it themselves because political advisers and spin doctors are not on the whole romantic types (apart perhaps from Vikki herself). Writers and poets best express love and there aren’t many of them in Australian politics. If Barnaby wants the very best advice, Shakespeare gets it right in Antony and Cleopatra.

(Mark Antony was a powerful triumvir in Rome, where a war was being fought for control of the Republic. Despite the high stakes, Antony is having a dalliance in Egypt with Cleopatra and finds himself head over heels in love with this exotic queen. He is so deeply enamoured that Rome and career no longer matter to him.)

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay. Our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life Is to do thus. (They embrace).