Ghostwriting from a bunker: Watson's tribute to Keating

A second-term "big picture" leadership agenda which included Mabo and support for a multicultural and minimalist republic bent on engaging with Asia did nothing for Keating’s popularity. The ringing endorsement handed out by the arts community was equally unhelpful.

Labor and its traditional constituency drifted apart, creating the vacuum which Pauline Hanson soon filled. Reading Watson, interestingly, is a good antidote to the populist or talkback claptrap that flourishes at such a time. He convincingly depicts the PMO as an isolated platoon with no ability to force its opinions, politically correct or otherwise, on to the wider community. Watson, when John Howard was reborn as Liberal leader, became increasingly snaky because the Canberra press corps baulked at putting a sunny spin on to each and every prime ministerial news event or policy initiative.

By 1996 the two Donnies - Watson and Russell - had sunk their policy differences. They bonded through adversity. No one else in Canberra, Watson suggests, shared their sense of mission and urgency. For Watson the public service departments were a Orwellian black hole, relations with the ALP national secretariat were toxic and most other ministerial offices, let alone the ministry and caucus as a whole, were marked down as a talent-free zone. Prime ministerial hubris of the sort exhibited by Bob Menzies in the days before he knew better went unchecked.

The bunker mentality was unrelieved. In a bid to outshine Howard policy papers were summoned up ever more feverishly just as, in a ghostly simulacrum, imaginary armies which existed only on paper once defended beleaguered Berlin. Defeat on 3 March 1996 ended this dance of death.

Keating’s undoing was rooted in his aggrieved sense of racial and political tribalism. This sense of history was wrongly pitched between Australia and America but Watson, though trained as an historian, did nothing about it. A true courtier, his frustration was overcome by admiration. Fealty required the ghostwriter to show zeal on behalf of his master rather than courage in standing up to him. He acquiesced in the "self-destructive outbursts" at the Lodge.

This complaisant spirit did Keating no good at all. The claustrophobic atmosphere in the PMO was not alleviated and it became impossible to open up bridges to non-believers. Retribution in March 1996 was inevitable and yet it need not have been so crushing and traumatic. Watson has still not recovered from the shock of defeat. His book will provide fellow true believers with an eloquent testament to dwell on in the barren years of their exile. But it will not encourage them to reconsider their ways.