The Marmalade Files (26 page)

Elizabeth Scott gazed up at the historical guard of honour, at the men, the good men, who had led the conservative forces through the last half-century. Menzies, Howard, Fraser – each a hero in his own way, all paid-up members of the Liberal pantheon.

She would join them one day, her black-and-white portrait emblazoned with the words ‘First female Liberal leader'. But on this Tuesday morning, with her restless colleagues circling, Scott had more immediate things on her mind.

Most weeks, the meeting of the joint parties – the Liberals and Nationals – was a mundane affair, punctuated by jovial banter and the odd policy stoush. But today, a pressing question needed to be asked and answered. Would the Coalition back the government's request to give the stricken Foreign Minister Catriona Bailey a parliamentary pair? It was a vote that would help decide whether the Toohey Government survived or not.

Scott was preparing to demand that her party back her judgement and say yes. It was a question of decency, she believed, but the Shadow Cabinet had baulked when she'd sought its support. So she was going to take the issue directly to her colleagues. It was a rare thing to do – to ask the party room to vote on a question of parliamentary tactics – but these were not normal times.

The main hurdle was Emily Brooks, the hard-Right warrior who had been courting the support of the Nationals and the conservative flank of the Liberal Party, and whose tough-as-nails approach in the Senate and the media had been credited with bringing the Toohey Government to its knees. In contrast, Scott knew there was growing unease with her own leadership style, and her failure to put sufficient distance between her small-l liberal view of the world and that of the discredited Labor brand.

So, she mused, it would come down to this: high principle versus brutal pragmatism. She would demand a vote to back her stance, with the implied threat of standing down if the party overruled her. It was a calculated, high-stakes gamble. But she didn't believe the Coalition would risk a leadership change when the Toohey Government was on life support.

She was wrong.

The press gallery began getting a sense of the unfolding drama when the joint party meeting ran into its second hour. Then some MPs and Senators started texting their media favourites with messages like ‘Things not going well for Scott' and ‘It's fucking unbelievable in here. Very heated.'

The television networks scurried to stake out the hallway outside the Coalition party room. They were joined by a gaggle of scribblers. The 24-hour broadcasters began to speculate that the leader had been rolled.

Finally, the doors opened and Alex Jacobs, the Liberal Whip, emerged alone, to be immediately consumed by the media crush.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please,' Jacobs pleaded. ‘I have a short statement and I won't be taking any questions. There will be press conferences shortly.

‘Today, after a debate on parliamentary pairs, Senator Emily Brooks moved a motion of no confidence in the leadership of Ms Elizabeth Scott. The ballot was tied. Ms Scott then stood down. Senator Brooks was elected leader.'

The gallery pack was dumbfounded. Scott had rolled the dice and lost. Like John Gorton in 1971, she had then done the honourable thing and resigned. The Scott experiment was over.

As the Whip finished speaking, a triumphant Emily Brooks emerged from the party room, an entourage of beaming followers in tow. Half the journalists in the group split off to record the first words of the new leader while the others stayed poised to witness the bitterness of the vanquished.

Cameramen positioned themselves in front of Brooks while journalists bombarded her with questions.

‘How do you feel?'

‘I am honoured and humbled.'

‘Do you feel sorry for Elizabeth Scott?'

‘Ms Scott is a great Australian and will be a great member of my team.'

‘How can a Senator be leader of the Opposition?'

‘Read the Constitution. Nothing stops a Senator from being Opposition leader or Prime Minister. But I will have more to say on that shortly.'

‘What does this mean for the Prime Minister?'

‘His worst nightmare.'

She swept past the cameras, making for her office on the Senate side of Parliament House.

Moments later Scott emerged with a couple of her staunchest supporters on either side. Her face was set, she looked tired, but in a triumph of will, she held her composure.

 

From his suite, Martin Toohey watched as Scott made her dignified way back to her office. It was only about seventy metres from the party room but she was slowed by the crush of media.

‘The Via Dolorosa of loss,' he said as he watched her journey, feeling every pain-filled step.

Scott said nothing except, ‘We'll have a press conference after you've heard from the leader.'

‘Well, Ms Scott,' Toohey whispered. ‘You're a better man than I am.'

 

Emily Brooks arrived back in her Senate suite, shut the door to her office and punched the air. She had ousted her hated rival and could now focus on taking the battle up to Martin Toohey and his dreadful administration. There would be no quarter given.

The Coalition would have one aim – to destroy Labor, quickly.

First, she would have to deal with her status as a Senator. The Westminster convention is that the Prime Minister be a member of the chamber where government is formed – the House of Representatives. But that is not demanded by the Constitution. At her first press conference, half an hour later, in the same room where she had executed Scott, Brooks outlined her plan. She would stay in the Senate until the general election was called, then she would resign and contest a lower house seat.

‘But that's ridiculous!' shouted one journalist.

‘Why? Because you say it is?' Brooks barked. ‘I don't agree. It's perfectly manageable. And you should remember two things. I expect an early election. And when it's called I will not ask any of my colleagues to stand aside and hand me a safe seat. I will contest the Treasurer's seat of Lilley. To win government we need to win Labor seats and I intend to play my part in that.'

It was a bravura performance. Brooks exuded confidence – some would say cockiness – but no one questioned that she was a stone-cold political killer and that Toohey now faced a much tougher challenge.

 

By contrast, Scott's press conference was muted. When a party leader falls, even the press gallery feels a sense of pity.

Scott appeared stunned, but was determined to hold it together. She had seen other leaders shed tears and thought it would only invite ridicule if she cried.

In the end it was a kind of out-of-body experience. The crushing pressure she had felt since taking the top job was gone.
In its place was the bitter hollowness of loss, coupled with a primal sense of relief.

‘What will you do now? Will you recontest?'

The question seemed almost to come out of a fog.

‘I'm going to take my time and have a think about it.'

‘Will you serve Emily Brooks on her front bench?'

‘No, I won't.'

When it was over, Scott made her way back to the Opposition leader's office to find that her staff was already packing. Her personal assistant tearfully smiled at her.

‘The calls have started to flood in,' she said. ‘Most of them congratulating you for showing some character and doing the right thing. They say it's rare in politics now and they've changed their opinion of you.'

‘Pity they didn't tell Newspoll that,' Scott said, wearily opening her personal office door. Sitting in the middle of her desk was a magnificent vase of flowers.

‘Those came a few minutes ago,' the assistant said. ‘Here's the card.'

Scott opened the envelope and removed a card bearing the handwritten words of a verse from
Paradise Regained
.

She felt a lump grow in her throat as she read the beautifully familiar verse to the end. Her eyes glazed with tears. It was Martin Toohey's handwriting.

The assistant looked at the card.

‘Who's it from?' she asked.

‘Nobody you'd recognise.'

Harry Dunkley scanned the rows of the mourning, uniform in their grief, and thought, what a pitiful crowd. Fewer than two dozen were seated in the spacious chapel.

In the front row, Gordon's soberly clad mother and sister sat solemnly, eyes rimmed with red, occasionally speaking softly to each other. Behind them, Ben's small community of cross-dressing buddies huddled together in gloomy counterpoint, their too-short black skirts, killer heels and platter-sized hats seeming almost grotesque in broad daylight, as if they'd staggered out of the bar scene in
Star Wars
.

In the second-last row, a man in a dark suit was sitting alone. His face was vaguely familiar. Dunkley made a mental note to seek him out when the service was over.

Ben's brother, Michael, had started to speak, welcoming the sparse crowd for what would be a short memorial. ‘And the
eulogy today will be delivered by Ben's oldest and dearest friend, Harry Dunkley …'

Dunkley rose, feeling as if he was floating off the ground. He needed to get a grip. He had spent hours trying to write something meaningful, but still felt a guilty pang of inadequacy.

‘I have spent my entire adult life crafting words …' He paused and cleared his throat. ‘Trying to find exactly the right phrase for exactly the right moment. But there are some places where words run out. I find myself in such a place now. I do not have the skill to find the right words to do justice to the life of my friend Ben Gordon. But I will try.

‘Ben and I were friends for nearly thirty years, and from the moment we met, in the Manning Bar at Sydney Uni, we instinctively liked each other. Ben was the sort of friend who stuck with you through thick and thin, who could be counted on to help out if you got into a tussle on the rugby field, or if your life was turning to mud.

‘He wrestled his whole life to come to terms with who he was, who he should be. He felt cheated by nature, and I never really realised until now what a heavy load that must have been for him. It would have crushed a lesser man, or woman.

‘I do not know what Ben was meant to be. I just hope he was at peace with himself when he died. But I do know this. Ben was my friend and his love was as reliable and constant as starlight. No matter how profound or painful his struggles, he never wavered as a friend. If anything, I failed to be the kind of friend he needed. He had asked me for years to call him Kimberley and, to my shame, I find it hard. Even now.'

Dunkley paused. ‘His death is hard to understand. The police report says it was another gay bashing in Canberra. That he died simply because he was the wrong kind of person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘But I don't believe it …' Dunkley glanced at his notes, composing himself before looking out into the crowd. He noticed that the man in the suit was crying. He continued, turning his gaze to the plain white coffin, draped with a garland of brightly coloured flowers.

‘Ben Gordon was taken from us too early, a beautiful, brilliant man who strayed into the path of some evil, twisted mind. But his spirit, his irrepressible spirit, will live on. And I will not rest until I find out the truth …' He fought back his own tears before uttering a word he had resisted for years: ‘… who killed our friend … Kimberley, and why.'

Dunkley bowed his head for a moment. Then he looked back from the coffin to the crowd and noticed the man in the dark suit had gone.