Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  For his part, McMahon was aware that his move to challenge Gorton had placed him in a precarious position. Worryingly, his standing among his allies had fallen. The manner of his losing, and the way in which the challenge had been mounted, had left McMahon exposed. Alan Reid felt that McMahon was finished as a leadership prospect.47 Newton, too, thought McMahon was now naked: he had left his run too late, had worried too much about his future, and was again dependent on Gorton.48 Howson was scathing: ‘Bill McMahon has been shown to lack courage in a crisis, not having, therefore, the real material for leadership.’49 McMahon could not have failed to be aware of these feelings; nor could he have been unaware of Gorton’s deep antipathy and desire to remove him from the Treasury.

  But willingly letting go of his prized portfolio was never in question. When he met with Gorton after 7 November and was told of Gorton’s plans to move him, McMahon put up a fight. He raised objections, ‘all sorts of pleas and arguments’, as to why he should be left in Treasury, and only after a resolute Gorton refused to budge did McMahon give way. But, even then, McMahon tried to draw victory from defeat. He told Gorton that if he could not be treasurer, then External Affairs was the only portfolio he would accept. Gorton was nonplussed. ‘It suited me all right so I let him have it,’ he said later. The question Gorton wanted answered, however, was whether there would be any ‘hitches’ by McMahon or other ministers at the swearing-in of ministers. Would there be any problems, any shows of defiance, any scenes or outbursts? McMahon told Gorton that everything would be right.50

  But Gorton had bigger dangers than McMahon. He had been wounded by the challenge. The fact of the government’s re-election had been overshadowed by the contest. Even if they had reconfirmed Gorton’s leadership, his colleagues were still doubtful about his abilities and his character. When McEwen met Hasluck on 11 November to discuss the agreement between the Liberal and Country parties, he was blunt. Gorton had not understood the problem of consultation. He had thought it meant some loss of his position as prime minister:

  But McEwen had told him that if he was making unilateral decisions it virtually meant that the Country Party was handing over its policy-making functions to the leader of another party. When he was slow to grasp this Mr McEwen had had to say to him: ‘Well get this into your head. There will be no coalition at all if you insist on having the sole right to make decisions that bind the Country Party without consultation with them.’ … The trouble was, McEwen said — and he spoke amusedly and without rancour — Mr Gorton had not the slightest idea about the system of cabinet government. We then discussed in a relaxed way the oddity that a man who had the advantage of a University education seemed never to have learned anything about the nature of political institutions or the conventions surrounding them.51

  As ever, the conversation came back to McMahon. McEwen thought it a mistake to move ‘the little man’ from the Treasury, and told Hasluck that it was a pity Menzies had not got rid of McMahon when he ‘had the wood on him’. The Liberal Party was ‘foolish’ for electing McMahon to the deputy leadership: ‘That laid the scene for their subsequent plots.’ And then McEwen wondered: had he acted unwisely back in 1967, vetoing McMahon’s candidacy? It was a good question, but not now one that much mattered. Looking ahead, McEwen was fatalistic.

  The Liberals, he told Hasluck, ‘still have trouble ahead’.52

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Loyalty

  1984

  Working to rewrite the memoir required Bowman to delve into the voluminous files that McMahon had assembled. Scattered through the dross and banal papers that filled those twenty-seven filing cabinets, there were documents that spoke to the unease and disputes with Gorton. Notably, they charted how disquiet had broken out in the course of the leadership challenge and been subsumed again in its aftermath. For all the caveats that had to be placed on their reliability, they portended a simmering and divided party.

  According to the documents, McMahon had spoken with Fairbairn before his challenge and told him that he did not think Fairbairn would succeed against Gorton.1 He had spoken with Gorton, too, about the demands McEwen made for extra Country Party representation in the ministry and cabinet. He had listened to Gorton wonder about defying McEwen. He wrote that Gorton believed the cause of the swing against the government had been Labor’s promise to subsidise interest rates on homes. To McMahon’s disagreement, and his suggestions that the DLP and Vietnam were the principal problems — foreign affairs, he told Gorton, needed someone with a political nose — Gorton was dismissive, and insistent on the centrality of housing as the issue.2 In his note of the meeting with McEwen in Melbourne on 3 November, McMahon told McEwen that Gorton had decided to emulate the ALP, saying that Whitlam had won because of his policy of centralisation. Why couldn’t he?

  In his account of that meeting, McMahon had also given clear signs of ingratiating himself with McEwen. The demands McEwen had made for extra representation in the ministry were appropriate, he had said, considering the Country Party’s numerical strength. So, also, was McEwen’s wish that devaluation assistance for rural export industries, like wool, continue. McMahon said that an inter-departmental review should consider the problem. Only then, after this exchange, did the two men move on to discuss McMahon’s prospective candidacy for the leadership.3

  Other memos went into the contest and its aftermath. Robert Cotton — a senator from New South Wales and former president of the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party, who, during the race to succeed Holt, had declared that McMahon enjoyed neither his support nor that of the New South Wales Liberal Party — had told McMahon that a challenge in the wake of the election was hopeless. But, Cotton went on, matters might be different after the half-Senate election, due to be held by mid-1971. The deck would be loaded against Gorton, Cotton had said. See how he did until then.4 The new treasurer, Les Bury, warned by McMahon that Gorton and Hewitt would erode his position if he were not careful, had said something of the same.5 When he spoke with Dudley Erwin, soon to be returned to the backbench, McMahon said he had tried to keep Erwin in the ministry, but had advocated him losing his position as leader of the House, on grounds that it was too much for him to handle. Erwin’s response to this was not recorded.6

  Then there were other documents that, in their own way, were of special significance. A confidential three-page memo written days after the 1969 election was particularly significant, even incendiary. It was a tour-de-force argument that disloyalty to Gorton was, in fact, not disloyalty at all:

  If we accept the fundamental premise that the incumbent [Gorton] is a national disaster and grossly unsuitable for the job, there is an obligation on those in a position of power to have him removed for the nation’s good … More than the leadership of the Liberal Party is involved — we are toying around with the destiny of this country … We are considering not only the re-election of a deficient leader of the Liberal Party — we are talking about the leadership of the country.

  If Gorton was able to remain in office, the memo continued, losses in the next Senate election, due by mid-1971, would be the result. Was party unity really the reason to not move against him?

  Declaring that McMahon was the only government member with sufficient stature to challenge Gorton, the memo went on to outline the extent of McMahon’s support and how it could be enlarged — by ‘overt and covert means’. McMahon would need a hard count of his supporters within the Liberal Party, first of all, but then he should endeavour to find out ‘which newspaper proprietors would back you; what would be the reaction from the political writers; how far would leading industrialists, businessmen, etc. back you — to the extent of influencing members of threatening not to supply funds to the Party if you were not elected; the use of newspaper advertisements canvassing your support’. The leadership would be a messy one to fight, the memo conceded, and McMahon should be prepared to go to the backbench should a challenge fall short.7

/>   Who had written the memo would clearly have been of interest. But its provenance was disguised: beyond the heading of confidentiality and the date, there was no author listed, no signature at its bottom.

  No MP can be held responsible for the contents of their mailbag. The mere receipt of the memo could not be held against McMahon. He had not written it. But he had seen the memo. He had thought it necessary to annotate it: just to the left of the reference to ‘the incumbent’, he had scrawled, ‘Gorton’, as if it had been ambiguous. He had clearly, too, seen fit to retain it: ‘Thanks,’ it said at the top, in his distinctive, thick black handwriting. ‘File.’ And at the top was another piece of his handwriting — the name of the press secretary whom McMahon, a year and a half after his departure, had still not seen fit to replace: ‘Peter Kelly’. Why was his name there? Did McMahon wish to hear his opinion of it?

  Kelly had seen the memo. He was given a copy. McMahon sought his opinion on it, even though he no longer worked for him. Kelly could recall the memo because of the spelling mistakes. ‘I remember reading it and thinking that this bloke [who wrote it] should have been a better speller than that,’ he said later. ‘I remember thinking that at the time.’

  According to Kelly, the author of the memo was Eric Robinson, the then–state president of the Queensland Liberal Party. Later to enter the House of Representatives and serve as a minister in the Fraser government, Robinson was well known as a Gorton critic and McMahon confidant, the provider of a home at the Isle of Capri where McMahon would sometimes holiday and make use of the telephone. ‘He was a very, very close friend of McMahon’s,’ Kelly said later. Robinson had left the memo unsigned because not to do so would have been dangerous. Had it ever leaked, it would have caused uproar within the party.

  What was the memo’s effect on McMahon? ‘He would have been flattered,’ Kelly said. ‘But he also would have read it very carefully and thought about it a lot.’8

  Evidently, McMahon did consider the memo closely. Only a few days after receiving it, he stood for the leadership of the Liberal Party. The question that mattered about the memo when Bowman encountered it was slightly different: had the memo sketched out a plan for what McMahon did afterwards?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A New Stage

  1969–1970

  The Gorton ministry that was sworn in on 12 November 1969 was conspicuously peopled by Young Turks. Four of the five new ministers — Don Chipp, member for Hotham and returning to the frontbench as the new minister for customs and excise; Tom Hughes, now member for Berowra and attorney-general; Jim Killen, member for Moreton and minister for the navy; and Andrew Peacock, member for Kooyong and minister for the army — were noticeably young, with thirty-year-old Peacock especially so. The vaulting promotions of Malcolm Fraser, to defence, and Billy Snedden, to labour and national service, were similarly notable. It was clear that the new ministry augured a shift within the government. By now, the Liberal-Country Party coalition had been in office for twenty years, and just as the ‘forty-niners’ had been blooded and risen to the ministry in the late 1950s, so, too, was another generation of Liberal-Country Party MPs beginning to take its place.

  Some of the older ministers resented this. Although Malcolm Scott and Bert Kelly returned quietly to the backbench after their demotions, Dudley Erwin was less than amenable. Having waited thirteen years for a ministerial appointment, Erwin was aggrieved by Gorton’s decision to dismiss him after barely eight months’ service as minister for air. Speaking to journalists in the days that followed, he blamed Gorton’s private secretary, Ainsley Gotto, and intimated that he had been sacked because he was not a member of the Mushroom Club, as the four Young Turks were.

  Erwin’s very public criticism brought attention to this benign, if widely disapproved of, group within the Liberal Party. So-called because, they said, they were kept in the dark and fed on bullshit, the thirteen members of the Mushroom Club were united only by the enjoyment of good food, wine, and discussion.1 Other Liberal MPs, already suspicious of ‘cocktail cabinets’ and cronyism, felt Erwin’s criticism keenly.2 They regarded the Mushroom Club as a voting bloc for the prime minister, and Gorton, mindful of the perception, asked that the club dissolve.

  Nonetheless, the damage was done. ‘So Gorton has promoted his friends but left himself without any allies on the backbench and has made no attempt to heal the rift which is now so wide in the party,’ Howson exalted.3 Fresh from organising against Gorton, Howson must have been surprised by the prime minister’s apparent obliviousness to the tension within the party. Gorton could not have been unaware: a report delivered to the Liberal Party’s federal executive would soon comment that the ‘road back’ to success would be ‘infinitely more difficult unless the Prime Minister, reaffirmed as Leader, is given full support and loyalty by the Federal Parliamentary Party and the Organisation, and unless the Government and Parliamentary Party work together as a team’.4 Moreover, at a party-room meeting on 24 November, the day before Parliament’s new session, an extended dissection of the election campaign and the government’s policies dominated the day, with considerable, if indirect, criticism of Gorton from Fairbairn and Howson. It would have been uncomfortable for Gorton and delightful for McMahon. As the new minister for external affairs and Howson agreed that night over the telephone, the meeting was ‘a most useful exercise’ that would be remembered in months to come.5

  Meanwhile, without much enthusiasm, McMahon started to delve into his new portfolio. ‘I didn’t want this job. I’m not interested in it,’ he told C.R. ‘Kim’ Jones, an official at the Australian embassy in Tokyo who reluctantly came to Canberra to interview for a position as McMahon’s principal private secretary. To Jones, McMahon made his concern for his new ministry abundantly clear: ‘I want someone who will look after things for me.’ Jones was startled, but not wholly surprised. ‘He was angry he had been moved from Treasury,’ Jones said later. The anger would not fade, but McMahon’s antipathy for his new ministry would dissipate. ‘He was aware that he would be judged as a minister on his performance there,’ said Jones. McMahon would work to make the portfolio a success.6

  Just as others had experienced, working for McMahon was not easy. ‘I found him quite difficult, initially,’ Jones said. It took him about six months to understand McMahon properly, to see his quirks and characteristics. McMahon was intelligent, in his own way, thought Jones. He was inclined to take advice and follow recommendations from the public service, but he also drew from views outside the public service. He was not much interested in people or things outside politics. His habit of underlining passages on briefing materials was unusual, but not necessarily indicative of an inability to absorb the content: ‘It could sometimes seem as though it was a bit of a substitute for reading.’ McMahon’s demands could be unpredictable. He had a tendency to assume that if he had a thought, everyone would know of it. Therefore, staff had to learn to anticipate McMahon: ‘You had to play a game of guesswork and assessment.’ He was courteous, rarely rude, but he could be very brisk. He was still not considerate of how his working habits could affect his staff: ‘He did his job, and felt they should do theirs.’

  McMahon worked hard, and worked long hours. He was assiduous, but sometimes not as sharp as he thought: his tendency to provide detail when answering questions in the House meant that Hansard pulls still had to be scrutinised closely. ‘Sometimes,’ said Jones, ‘I had to massage Hansard to correct — without substantially altering — his answers.’ McMahon moved paper quickly, and was constantly on the lookout for more to do. ‘He hated to have nothing to do at any point,’ Jones said. ‘At quiet moments — waiting at airports, on planes, travelling in cars — he would telephone somebody, or think up tasks for the department, or his office.’ It called for some adroit management. To keep McMahon focused, to occupy him and, at times, to distract him, Jones made sure to always have a supply of written material on hand that he could give his minister t
o work through. McMahon’s habit of producing aide-mémoires, and what was in them, was also notable: ‘They were his version of what happened,’ said Jones. ‘Sometimes they were what he would have liked to have happened … There was an element of wishful thinking in them.’

  Sonia’s effect on her husband was also noteworthy. Rumours that their marriage was a sham were rubbish. Jones saw a strong, loving relationship. ‘She was a very positive influence on him,’ he said later. ‘Sonia was good at managing him, steering him, preparing him, keeping him in a good mood.’ Travel was notably easier when Sonia was around; moreover, she could speak to her husband in a way that others could not. Averse to late nights, favouring a good night’s sleep, disdainful of conversations without meaning or purpose, McMahon could be oblivious to niceties and leave a dinner as soon as dessert was finished. Sonia, however, could remind him to stay put.7

  His new responsibilities also put to good use his talents in entertainment. For all the derision and dislike that McMahon aroused among colleagues, he was an immensely charming man. The qualities that saw him become a fixture at Sir Frank Packer’s dinner table never went away, and, on the diplomatic circuit, he could be similarly attractive company.8 At dinners and at parties, in meetings, and indeed in idle conversations, McMahon could be witty and lively, humourous and quick. ‘He is a charming and generous host and a gracious guest and is surprisingly attractive to women,’ Don Chipp would later say.9 Fashionably dressed with expensive tastes — ‘Hunt, you’re wearing the same tie as I am,’ he told Ralph Hunt once, to which Hunt replied that McMahon’s tie was likely three times the price — McMahon could strike those who met him as urbane and knowledgeable: in sum, the perfect dinner companion.10 Others agreed, but placed a heavy caveat on this. ‘He could be charming, but he was always trying too hard,’ journalist Mungo MacCallum, nephew of Billy Wentworth, said later. ‘His ambition always got the better of him. At that point (indeed, before it) he could become a crashing bore.’11