Abbott now liberally wrecking the party
TONY Abbott has a new title and it sure ain’t a knighthood. He is now the Liberal Party’s wrecking ball, leaving a trail of destruction across the nation.
After helping to seal Denis Napthine’s fate as the leader of Victoria’s first one-term government in more than half a century, the prime minister has helped Campbell Newman make even more inglorious history.
Three years ago, Newman became the first person to become a premier without having spent a single day in the Parliament. Now he has lost his seat, and could be the first state or national leader to do so while his party retains power.
Or, even more damning, the party that won 75 to Labor’s seven seats in 2012 is facing the prospect of defeat. Labor is poised to return to government just one term after the Liberal National Party crushed it in 2012. The ALP on Saturday won at least 43 of the 45 seats it needs to form government in its own right.
For this, Newman must carry the overwhelming responsibility, but the Abbott factor cannot be denied.
Whether it was the difference between Newman hanging on to his seat is arguable. What is beyond question is this: the Liberal National Party’s shocking showing will dramatically ramp up the anxiety of the Abbott backbench and the pressure on his leadership.
If Abbott’s Queensland colleagues were feral before the Queensland vote, they will be even more inclined to rash action after it. Back in November, after the Coalition was despatched in Victoria, Abbott’s spinners like Scott Morrison said federal factors had nothing to do with it, and pointed to how well Newman was doing in Queensland as evidence.
The Victorian campaign was topped and tailed by reminders of Abbott’s failures to keep to his election commitments, from the increase in fuel excise to the cuts to ABC and SBS funding.
There were a couple of fleeting appearances by the prime minister in the campaign, including the hug he gave Napthine that Labor MPs dubbed the ‘‘kiss of death’’.
While Abbott acted on advice to stay well clear of Queensland, this campaign was similarly replete with reminders of the federal Coalition’s unpopularity, from a backdown on Medicare that did not solve the co-payment problem, to the Prince Philip knighthood fiasco, which I suspect will be remembered as the most spectacular own goal by a prime minister.
Certainly, it would have hardened the resolve of those republicans in Newman’s seat of Ashgrove who were inclined to punish those who do not listen.
What compounded Newman’s Abbott problem is that both were guilty of the same sins: breaking election commitments, an inability to sell their policies and expending valuable political capital on ideological frolics. People know the difference between federal and state issues, but the differences are muddied when the narrative is the same.
What must send a chill down the prime minister’s spine is that, right now, he would face a similarly harsh judgment.
The first question raised by the Queensland result is how potent the Abbott factor will be when New South Wales goes to the polls at the end of March, assuming there is no move against him before then. This time, invisibility will not be an option for Abbott. It’s his home state.
The second question is whether Abbott can arrest his slide and rebuild the confidence of the electorate. That is far, far less certain. Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman & Nancy Davis .
Reagan’s conquests ranged from 1930s silver screen sirens Joan Blondell and Lana Turner to the young Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day.
The strait-laced radio announcer fromIllinois turned into ‘‘Horndog’’ Reagan under the influence of Errol Flynn, his neighbour and occasional room-mate at the Sunset Boulevard hotel, who boasted of bedding 12,500 ‘‘warm bodies’’, sometimes up to four at a time.
Reagan, who died in 2004 aged 93, was involved with around 50 women in Hollywood – still enough to make past biographers uncomfortable and prone to overlooking them, Darwin Porter, the book’s author, said last week.
Porter, whose mother made costumes for stars such as Monroe, said he had spoken to ‘‘many, many’’ of the women romanced by Reagan before he married actress Nancy Davis and turned to politics.
‘‘Nearly all of them spoke fondly of Reagan – even if they did not share his right-wing politics, they felt he was a nice guy,’’ said Porter, a journalist. ‘‘But he suffered from what he jokingly referred to as ‘‘leadingladyitis.’’
Even his most important romances before his first wife, Jane Wyman, have been airbrushed out of the biographies – as Wyman herself has largely been from his presidential library. Only Nancy Reagan, still protecting the legacy at 93, shares the spotlight.
‘‘But such easy charm helps explain why Reagan was so successful when he abandoned his early liberal beliefs, spied on other actors for the FBI when running the actors’ union SAG [Screen Actors’ Guild] and remade himself as a conservative icon,’’ Porter added.
The strapping former American football player was offered a seven-year acting contract by Warner Bros in 1937, which never came to much.
His most famous film, King’s Row, from 1942, is remembered for his character’s line after waking from an operation to find himself an amputee: ‘‘Where’s the rest of me?’’
A decade later he was still in B-movies, playing the straight man to a chimpanzee in a comedy called Bedtime for Bonzo.
He was still well paid, however, and popular with Hollywood women, who pursued him more than he chased them, according to Author Darwin Porter, about Ronald Reagan the book.
His three-room bungalow amid the shrubbery of the Garden of Allah became the centre of his nightly endeavours, which began when Warner Bros set him up on dates with starlets to promote both their respective careers.
Reagan was so busy that he was reluctant to squire Lana Turner, a curvaceous actress known as the Sweater Girl, to a premiere of a Bette Davis film – until he was told it would affect his career if he did not.
He was glad he made it. Later he told another actor, Dick Powell: ‘‘Lana is just as oversexed as I am. But I have to slip around because I don’t want [fellow actress] Susan Hayward to find out.’’
In his memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan did not mention Turner, but she told the author that Reagan liked to take his time: she said he was a ‘‘40-minute man’’ compared with another future president she knew, John F Kennedy, who was a ‘‘four-minute man’’.
When Reagan’s marriage to Wyman fell apart, he drove his turquoise Cadillac back to his bungalow and become smitten with the young Marilyn Monroe. According to Phil Karlson, a director who introduced them, Reagan described her as ‘‘sensational’’, to which she replied: ‘‘I’m even more sensational when you get to know me.’’
Another actor, William Holden, said that after Reagan broke his thigh bone Monroe would visit him daily to give him pleasure behind a closed hospital door.
At the same time he was considering marrying Doris Day, who would go on to become one of the biggest musical stars of the 1950s.
George Murphy, a friend of Reagan, told him that she would be a great choice because ‘‘if people get bored with your longwinded political speeches, she can just turn up and sing’’.
Perhaps tired of waiting, Day married another man, who would lose all her money in bad investments. Reagan went on to marry another actress, Nancy Davis, who would prepare him to become the 40th president of the United States in 1981.
A staunch anti-communist, Reagan publicly described the Soviet Union as an ‘‘evil empire’’.
Porter’s book is being optioned for a movie that would contrast strongly with a proposed Disney film, entitled Reagan, that will cover the same years but focus on his political career as a source of ‘‘universal inspiration’’.
A former executive at the Reagan Presidential Library last week said the Reagan family would be ‘‘a lot more happy’’ with the Disney version.