The Marmalade Files (10 page)

As she'd prepared for her
Lateline
interview, Catriona Bailey had carried the worrying signs of an impending stroke. All the things she'd put down to tiredness would have disturbed a trained eye: dropping the glass, the dizziness, the trouble she had understanding questions, the headache, the difficulty she had writing.

It was her addiction to galloping about the world to insert herself in the news cycle that was at the root of the problem. A punishing series of jaunts saw her more rundown than usual and she had picked up the flu on her way back to Canberra. Typically defying orders to rest she'd ploughed on until a fever forced her to bed. The flu is much more dangerous than many appreciate and Bailey's heart was damaged by it. Her fever broke but a blood clot had formed in her heart and was pumped out and up a vertebral artery that emerges at the base of the brain and merges with another to form the basilar artery.

Here the clot lodged. It cut the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain's junction box, the pons, which suffered catastrophic damage.

And so Bailey collapsed and appeared to be unconscious and unreachable. But she was not. She had suffered a very particular type of stroke and the effect was coma-like, but not a coma.

What Bailey was experiencing was locked-in syndrome. She had been completely unconscious for over a day, but then she woke. She struggled to remember what had happened. She found she could hear and think clearly but was unable to move a single muscle in her body, even to open her eyes. And there was the problem. Others afflicted by locked-in syndrome could alert doctors to their fate by blinking responses. But Bailey's eyes remained firmly shut. In any case, her doctors were consumed by the task of simply keeping her alive. Even the most astute neurologist would have struggled to diagnose what was going on in Bailey's brain at this stage of her illness.

The first words she'd heard on waking came from a familiar voice.

‘You selfish bitch.'

It was Martin Toohey, the bastard who had stolen the only thing that mattered to her: her job. The man she would never forgive.

And the man who didn't know that she had already laid a landmine that would destroy him and bring down his government full of traitors.

That thought of revenge empowered and sustained her. If she could have smiled, she would have.

For nearly a century, the Brookings Institution has been at the heart of every serious policy tussle in the US. A brisk ten-minute walk from the White House, it has also achieved the near impossible: in blindingly partisan Washington, it has the respect of both the Democrats and Republicans.

For Catriona Bailey, Brookings was as familiar and welcoming as the United Nations headquarters in New York. She had been a regular visitor for thirty years, using its global diaspora as her own kind of personal Wikipedia. She'd shifted, slightly, her view on the West Bank settlements after a series of animated discussions with a Jewish academic she'd met a decade before, and who was now courting trouble in Jerusalem with his pro-Palestinian views.

For as long as she could remember, Bailey had wanted to be a part of Brookings, to be endorsed by it, feted by it and ushered into its inner sanctum.

As a student in the 1970s, Bailey had courted contacts at Brookings as a hooker courts her clientele; her appointment as a non-resident senior fellow was one of the proudest days of her life. But not the proudest. That came in April 2008 when Bailey returned to Brookings as Prime Minister of Australia, making her first trip overseas aboard the Boeing 737 the Howards had ordered six years before. She had chosen Brookings as the venue for her first serious foreign policy speech, a statement that she was sure would resonate around the globe.

Bailey wanted to recast the relationship between the US and China, and saw herself as a kind of regional intermediary, the Kissinger-of-the-Pacific. Her speech – an opus stretching nearly fifty minutes – outlined her views on how to manage the rise of China and how to refashion the post World War II power settlements to ensure China was a stakeholder in all decisions affecting global security. She argued that conflict between the US and China was avoidable and the ‘Pacific century' should be marked by a close working relationship between the Americans and Chinese.

It was a bold foray into global affairs, and well received by the policy wonks at Brookings, who were delighted to see one of their own elevated into a position of serious influence. Over morning tea, the Washington intelligentsia helped to fuel the notion that Cate Bailey was the woman the West needed at this vital hour, when the power balance was shifting East. Some said she could be the most important leader of her generation, the Thatcher of her time, a murmur Bailey did nothing to dispel with the travelling Australian media pack.

But it was a special meeting after the speech that helped lift that day into the stratosphere. The US presidential primaries were in full swing and Bailey's office, together with the Australian Ambassador, had called in every favour to try and get ‘face-time' and, more importantly, picture opportunities, with each of the three key candidates: the Republican frontrunner John McCain and the two Democrats who were still locked in a bruising struggle, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In the end, Obama proved elusive, and Bailey had to settle for a thirty-minute phone conversation with the black superstar, something her staff later paid for dearly.

But Hillary – well, that was a different equation. Clinton was an old friend, a member of the sisterhood and a Brookings fellow traveller. She called in for a delightful forty-minute chat with Bailey after her ‘rise of China' speech.

So chuffed was Bailey by Clinton's show of support that she made a minor faux pas during the photo opportunity when the obvious question was asked: ‘So, are you backing Mrs Clinton for President?'

Bailey got that goofy look on her face that always emerged when she knew she was cornered. Clinton had done her an enormous favour, but … how could a new Australian PM express a preference in US domestic politics?

‘Well, you know me … we girls have got to stick together.'

Clinton beamed, taking it as an endorsement – a sentiment shared by the travelling media pack. The PM's media minders were forced to spend hours hosing it down, claiming it was
nothing more than an expression of friendship, not a signal of preference over Obama.

 

Three years after she had delivered that brilliant speech, Bailey was back and so much had changed. Officially, Bailey was in DC as the Foreign Minister to hear Clinton, as Secretary of State, address Brookings on what the Arab Spring meant for US relations in the Middle East.

Unofficially, she had a very specific message she intended to deliver.

After Clinton's speech the two old friends sat down in the same room where, in 2008, they had met in such different roles. The irony was not lost on either of them.

‘Things didn't exactly turn out the way we expected,' quipped Clinton.

‘No,' said Bailey. ‘I certainly didn't see it coming, did you?'

‘For a long time Bill was convinced that we would win, and so was everyone else who mattered … But what can you do? It's history; Obama has been surprisingly gracious and … well, this is a great job.'

‘So is mine,' Bailey lied. Just the memory of being Prime Minister was enough to make her wince. And she suspected Clinton felt the same about missing out on becoming the leader of the Free World.

‘There's something we're concerned about, Cate.' Clinton seamlessly switched to business. ‘We hear from our embassy that your Defence Minister is considering making big cuts. Our
people are keen to ensure your commitment to the Joint Strike Fighter is rock solid.'

‘Hillary, you know that's sacrosanct,' Bailey said. ‘I made it a priority when I was Prime Minister and Toohey has publicly backed it.'

‘We aren't concerned about you or Toohey. We're concerned about Paxton. Is he committed to the Alliance? His public remarks are quite pro-China.'

‘Paxton's from Western Australia. They all love China because it's making them rich. I'm sure his past … dalliances … were, well, meaningless.'

‘Dalliances?' The alarm in Clinton's voice was obvious, and Bailey closed the net.

‘It was a long time ago. He was just a union official on one of those visits the Labor Left used to make to China. It was the first time I met him. He was introduced to a young Tibetan woman, Weng Meihui. She turned out to be working for their intelligence service.'

‘And the nature of this relationship?' Clinton leaned closer.

‘Well, she was very … persuasive.'

‘You're telling me that Australia's Defence Minister had a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy?'

‘He wasn't Defence Minister then. And he hadn't seen her for years …'

‘Hadn't?'

‘Until three months ago. February. They met again over dinner.'

‘Are you sure? How do you know?'

‘Because, Hillary, I hosted it.'

Bailey paused to allow her friend to fully absorb the revelation before continuing. ‘Look, Hillary, I'm sure it isn't serious.'

‘Cate, I'm not so sure.'

‘Hillary, no …' For the next ten minutes, Bailey launched a strident defence of Paxton. For the record. But, as she left, she knew the damage had been done. The clock was now ticking.

A smile creased her face.

‘Those bastards, those grubby, calculating fucking bastards.'

Each word was spat out by Sam Buharia, who sat with a neat espresso, dumbfounded by the front page of the
Australian
.

He both hated the national broadsheet for its relentless campaigning against Labor, and admired it for its audacious use of power. But this morning, Rupert's flagship had gone too far.

BAILEY IN COMA OUT-POLLS TOOHEY

In an act of rat-cunning Sussex Street would have been proud of, the
Oz
had included Bailey in its fortnightly Newspoll. Oh, and just to ram home the point, the paper had splashed it all over page one. Gleefully.

Catriona Bailey was ten points ahead of Martin Toohey as preferred Prime Minister – even more so with Labor voters – and twenty points in front of Opposition leader Elizabeth Scott.

The imagery was devastating, Buharia thought. A half-dead politician out-polling the PM screamed that Toohey was a dead man walking. The only good news, if any could be extracted from this stinking turd of a front page, was that the dropkick of an Opposition leader was stone motherless dead. If she was leading Labor, he would have capped her months ago.

Killing off leaders was something of a sport for Buharia. He was the one who signed the death warrant, leaving his loyal lieutenants to push the bodies down the elevator shaft. He'd had a hand in putting down two New South Wales Premiers and one Prime Minister, a record unique in Australian politics. Unfortunately he didn't seem to equate semi-regular assassination with long-term brand damage.

He was almost single-handedly responsible for what people dubbed the New South Wales disease: the poll-driven approach to politics that focused on spin, and had wrung the last juices of idealism out of Labor's marrow. What was left were the dry bones of a once great party.

Buharia was obsessed with polling, particularly the focus groups of six to eight people who were gathered as litmus tests of community sentiment. He did not understand that, properly used, the idea was to lead that sentiment, not follow it. Buharia's favourite saying after any focus group was, ‘The punters hate it, mate.' One negative focus group on an issue was enough for him to start demanding that the government abandon multi-million-dollar projects. Several months of bad results saw him orchestrating Cabinet reshuffles.

He had coveted power from an early age and graduated from
playground racketeering to Labor politics with ease. He had a gift for arithmetic and soon discovered that a man who could deliver numbers in Labor was a man to be reckoned with. He cultivated ethnic community leaders who could swing large groups of their people into ALP branches at a moment's notice. These flying squads would arrive at a branch en masse, sign up as members and then vote whichever way Buharia wanted.

And so Buharia had risen through the ranks of his party to be New South Wales Secretary by the age of thirty, continuing the tradition of colourful characters who had littered Labor's past all the way back to its 1891 origins. But he lacked subtlety and foresight. He failed to see that just winning power was not enough to sustain a government, or a party. In the end you have to stand for something.

Watching appalled from Victoria, Brendan Ryan would note, ‘Buharia thinks a year is 365 contests for the 6 p.m. news. He's all tactics and no strategy. And what he's done is lose us his State for a generation.'

Buharia quit his role as Secretary for the sinecure of the Senate before the full horror of his work in New South Wales was apparent. There he could enjoy a long career in relative anonymity. And continue to pull strings behind the scenes.

After about two minutes of absorbing the Bailey headline – a reasonably in-depth study by his standards – Buharia picked up his mobile and hit autodial 1.

‘Cunts,' the current New South Wales State Secretary spat as he picked up.

‘Yes mate, but what do we do about it?'