CHAPTER THREE

Barnaby’s doodle

The government crashed into the pits in February, thanks to Barnaby Joyce. Or, more accurately, thanks to Barnaby’s doodle, as James McGrath rather delicately described it when it was all over. It was a disaster at every conceivable level – personally for Joyce and his family, politically for him, and for the future wellbeing of the Turnbull government.

There were reverberations all the way through to the election as Joyce sought to reclaim his leadership. He refused to accept that he was part of the problem, and not part of the solution. His successes were overshadowed, particularly among women, by his great lapses. His actions not only put the spotlight on internal divisions; they were a reminder of his unacceptable behaviour.

Joyce’s political career had been remarkable. He was a rebel senator who found endless opportunities during the Howard years to vote against the government. In the space of three years, he went from being a senator from Queensland, to winning the lower-house seat of New England in New South Wales, to then becoming the Nationals’ leader and the deputy prime minister. His regularly expressed desire to replicate that feat before the 2019 election by reclaiming the leadership and the deputy prime ministership continued to divide the Nationals and damage the government.

Before the election, friends of his drew a mental map of another avenue for his rehabilitation. Just not federally. Given what he had accomplished before, they thought it was not beyond the realms of possibility that if he shifted back to Queensland and got himself into state parliament, he could become premier – a latter-day Joh Bjelke-Petersen minus the corruption.

However, even this fantasy pathway to redemption was upended by his increasingly erratic behaviour, including an unhinged interview during the campaign with Patricia Karvelas on ABC’s Radio National. The interview, on water buy-backs, is more impactful in the listening than the writing, but high-pitched attacks on ‘Labor, Labor, Labor’ sent Coalition campaigners into a spin – more so the next day, when he could not understand why it would be better if he stayed away from a planned media event rather than turn up and kick the affair into the next day. He thought the interview had gone really well. Although the Nationals held all their seats in May 2019, they were beside themselves when their bluest of blue-ribbon seats of Mallee in Victoria recorded a primary vote of 29 per cent. They blamed the plunge on Joyce’s water policies and the brand damage caused by him and the outgoing local member, Andrew Broad, with their doodle problems.

Joyce’s passage from maverick, to prime political asset, to unqualified liability – especially from the second-highest office in the land to a lowly backbencher over the course of a few weeks, thanks to an extramarital affair – is an extraordinary story.

There had been rumours since early 2017 that Joyce was having an affair with a staffer. One National frontbencher recalls a conversation he had with fellow frontbencher Michael McCormack, who would succeed Joyce in the leadership, that took place around June. It was a few months after the frontbencher had first heard about it. The two men were in furious agreement about what would happen once it got out, as it was bound to do: it would end in tears. There was no sign from McCormack at this stage that he was positioning himself to take over; they were only sharing concerns that once it became public knowledge that the then deputy prime minister was having an affair with his staffer Vikki Campion, who had begun working with him during the 2016 election campaign, everything would go pear-shaped.

The rumours had also reached the prime minister’s office early on. Joyce’s mood-swings, and the obvious stresses and strains on him, his family, and his staff were obvious, affecting both his performance and the functioning of the government.

Joyce’s staff were in an invidious position, caught between him and his wife, and him and the other woman, who also happened to be his media advisor. Dealing with him and the two women was incredibly difficult. The staff suffered collateral damage, as staff always do when the boss crashes and burns. In this case, there were the inevitable questions about how they could have managed the situation better. As if Joyce, a free spirit, could ever be managed.

Many months later, in the wake of criticisms about the performance of staff, his senior media adviser, later chief of staff, Jake Smith, could laugh about it as he relayed to friends the conversation he had with another friend, a senior Queensland National, who had asked him when it was all over, ‘Explain to me how the deputy prime minister gets his staffer pregnant, and somehow it’s the fault of the gay guy?’

It was an impossible situation, completely unmanageable, partly because of the personalities involved. Campion was very open about her relationship with Joyce – not only to other staff in the office, but to other coalition staff as well, telling them about bushwalking expeditions or other social engagements with her boss. She made no secret of her closeness to Joyce. She would describe him as the loneliest man in the parliament.

Whatever the nature of the relationship in those early stages, and from the very moment she joined the office, staff who were alert to the potential for disaster did their best to keep them apart by trying to arrange separate travel. But what some saw as her frankness, and others, her indiscretion, ensured that the gossip spread quickly through the Coalition. It didn’t take long for people to become convinced it had developed beyond the professional, beyond platonic.

Eventually, Joyce’s then chief of staff, Di Hallam, along with his friend and colleague Matt Canavan, succeeded in convincing Joyce that Campion could no longer work in his office.

Barnaby’s increasingly suspicious wife, Natalie, had been ringing Joyce’s ministerial office asking staff probing questions. It put them under enormous pressure, deepening their emotional and ethical conflict, and sorely testing their loyalties. Mrs Joyce, who at that stage had access to her husband’s diary and could see the frequency of his travels with Campion, travelled to Canberra in February 2017 to try to find out what was going on. Once in the office, she quizzed an uncomfortable Hallam about her husband’s activities, and then threatened to confront Campion.

No matter the circumstances, Hallam, as chief of staff, did not feel it was appropriate for her to allow the minister’s wife to tackle a staff member in the office over what was essentially a personal matter. Mrs Joyce chose instead to confront her husband in his office. Staff cringed as doors slammed. They could not hear exactly what was being said, but they could hear the couple yelling, and then saw the distressed expressions on their faces when it was over.

It was awkward and embarrassing. As Joyce’s personal life unravelled, it was clear that his professional life would suffer and that the toll would escalate. Staff, including Hallam and Smith, as well as his colleagues, told him he had a choice. If he wanted to remain in his job, let alone save his marriage, Campion had to leave his office.

It is also fair to say that his staff and his other confidants were concerned about the wellbeing of Joyce’s family, as much as they were for his political career. Making the situation that much harder, they were all fond of Natalie and the four girls.

Joyce’s former chief of staff, the then backbencher Scott Buchholz, also became involved. Buchholz had stayed mates with Joyce, and they would share the odd nightcap here and there. Hallam also sought his advice. Buchholz told her to make sure that all the paperwork dealing with all entitlements was in order. Being a smart operator, Hallam had already done that, seeking reimbursement from Joyce for two claims.

Buchholz also spoke to Joyce. He did not ask him if the rumours were true, figuring it was not his business. Buchholz simply told him he had heard the chatter, as had almost everybody else, and if it erupted, asked Joyce whether he was sure he had the numbers to hang onto his leadership. He suggested to Joyce that he start spending more time with his backbenchers.

When Sally Cray heard the rumours about Joyce and Campion in early 2017, she told Turnbull. Turnbull, who is conventional and prudish about such matters, believing it is always best for couples in trouble to stick together, invited Joyce to dinner at The Lodge soon after. It was just the two of them.

He did not ask Joyce directly if he was having an affair with Campion, but he gave Joyce every opportunity to volunteer the news by asking about his wife, Natalie, and their daughters. There was no hint from Joyce that anything was amiss.

Campion was shifted to Canavan’s office in April 2017, which lifted the pressure a bit from Joyce’s other staff – although, as it transpired, not enough.

On 11 May, two days after the budget, one of Turnbull’s press secretaries, Daniel Meers, took a call from the Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson. She was checking a tip-off that Joyce had been seen – purportedly by a Labor person – at a medical clinic the day before the budget with Campion, holding an envelope with scans, and that he had then gone into the doctor’s consulting rooms with her.

There had also been a bizarre incident the previous weekend when Joyce was acting prime minister. His VIP flight from Whyalla was diverted to Canberra rather than back to Tamworth because of a pending announcement from Buckingham Palace, which turned out to be that Prince Philip was relinquishing royal duties. News reports said that Joyce was cranky he had missed a home-cooked meal.

‘I was happily on my way back to Tamworth until my media adviser told me to happily make my way to Canberra and now I’m not very happy,’ Joyce was quoted as saying jokingly.

Staffers’ eyebrows shot up. There were a few too many ‘happy’s in there. To them, it seemed like he actually looked forward to spending time away from Tamworth, not in Tamworth.

So a few days later, when staff told Turnbull that journos were querying Joyce’s surgery visit with Campion, he asked Joyce to come around to his office. Turnbull told him that media were asking his office about him and Campion visiting the doctor together.

Joyce told him that Campion had been ill, they feared she might have cancer, she was estranged from her family, she had had a terrible upbringing, and he had gone with her to the doctor’s as her friend. This time, Turnbull asked Joyce directly if they were having an affair. Joyce said they were not.

Joyce was enraged that word had leaked out about his visit to the surgery with Campion. He was looking for people to blame. He zeroed in on his loyal chief of staff, who happened to be the messenger delivering the request that the prime minister had wanted to see him.

It triggered a blazing row between Joyce and Hallam in his office. This time, it was so loud that staff in the outer office could hear what was being said. Joyce and Hallam dropped more than their fair share of f-bombs during what was the most fearful row. Hallam, who had been with Joyce for three-and-a-half years, had already decided earlier in the year that she would look for another job. If she needed any confirmation that she had made the right decision, this was it, despite the fact that they made up a few days later.

Not long after the row, Hallam took extended sick leave. She never went back. Her departure fuelled even more rumours and gossip about what had prompted her departure.

Joyce also told other MPs who asked him what was going on, after they, too, had heard that he and Campion had visited the doctor together, that Campion had been ill and he had accompanied her as a friend.

When Canavan resigned from the ministry in late July because of doubts over his eligibility to sit in parliament because of his mother’s Italian heritage, Campion was shifted to the office of the Nationals’ whip, Damian Drum. Later, whatever Campion’s qualifications for the job, this was used against both her and Joyce because it looked like he was finding highly paid employment for his mistress.

Drum says that when Joyce’s then chief of staff, Matt Coultan, who had temporarily replaced Hallam, asked him to take Campion on after Canavan’s resignation, Coultan told him that there had been a relationship, but it was over. It wasn’t all that long after Joyce had appeared at the mid-winter ball with his wife in what later turned out to be a stage-managed appearance worthy of Hollywood. After being told about the affair well before the ball from usually reliable sources, as they say, I had decided to include a paragraph in the updated version of The Road to Ruin, released in August 2017.

However, after seeing the pictures of him with his wife, and assuming they were back together, I decided not to name Joyce. Instead, I wrote that if a smart journalist matched up travel entitlements between minister and staffer, they could come up with a story with the potential to wreck careers and shatter the government.

Sharri Markson was already on to it, and she persisted.

It wasn’t long before Drum began receiving calls from the media asking if the affair was back on, citing instances where they had been seen together. Drum says he thinks this happened in August, before Joyce’s own citizenship came under question.

Drum saw Joyce, who he says by then was staying with his (Joyce’s) sister. Drum says he told Joyce he was having to field questions about his relationship with Campion. He says he told Joyce, ‘You have to come clean and tell the Australian people you are out of home. You gotta tell them. Then all this stuff is no one’s business. You are a single man.’

Joyce said he did not want to do that because it would hurt his children.

Drum warned, ‘You are going to hurt them a shitload more if this comes out in front of you and you are not in control of it.’ It was blunt, accurate advice, worth heeding. Joyce didn’t take it.

The rumours continued, including suggestions that Campion was pregnant. This news puzzled senior Nationals, who believed – apparently after some cryptic comments from the man himself when the rumours were gaining strength – that he had undergone a vasectomy. Joyce had been telling people that he could not have any more children – or words to that effect – leading them to believe he had had minor corrective surgery, or was suffering some other ailment.

While he was grappling with the affair and its likely repercussions on his family, Joyce discovered in August that, by virtue of his father’s birth in New Zealand, he was a dual citizen. The New Zealand high commissioner, Chris Seed, rang Joyce’s office on 10 August seeking an urgent one-on-one with him to deliver the bad news. As soon as Seed told him, Joyce said, ‘I’m fucked.’

Joyce was prepared to go to a by-election immediately. However, Turnbull thought that was a bad idea, and despite his conviction that Joyce had no problem with his eligibility and that the High Court ‘will so rule’, the High Court did in fact rule him ineligible.

In early October, Joyce travelled to Inverell, John ‘Wacka’ Williams’ territory, to attend the Sapphire City Festival. The straight-talking Williams, something of a father confessor for Joyce, had known months before that Joyce’s marriage was in trouble. Williams had told Joyce back then that he and his wife, Nancy, would not be ‘picking sides’ between him, Natalie, and their four daughters.

Williams and his wife were close to Natalie and the girls. The Joyce family had stayed with them at their house, so Wacka and Nancy were not going to choose between their friends.

When the official duties were over in Inverell, Williams invited Joyce home for a bite and a cuppa. While Nancy was inside preparing lunch, the two men sat out the back near the barbecue area and talked. It wasn’t small talk, either. Joyce told Williams that Vikki was eight weeks’ pregnant.

Williams says he said to him, ‘Well, of course you would not consider an abortion.’ Joyce replied, ‘Never.’

‘Good,’ Williams said to him. ‘Whatever happens, it’s not the kid’s fault.’

Williams then warned Joyce that his daughters would be very upset with him, and that it would take a long time for the wounds to heal.

Williams does not know if at that stage Joyce had told his family that he was going to be a father again. He believes he was one of the first people Joyce told, in confidence. Williams kept his secret.

During his campaign to reclaim his seat of New England, Joyce was not once accompanied by his wife or daughters. He deflected questions relating to his family, saying his personal life was his personal life, further fuelling the speculation that something was definitely wrong.

There was, however, one incident during the campaign. Turnbull flew to Tamworth on 7 November, Melbourne Cup Day, to campaign with Joyce. Screens were set up in a large marquee for spectators to watch the race that supposedly stops the nation. They were working the tent together, but during the running of the race, Joyce slipped away to speak to a visibly upset young woman who had tackled him. She was in tears. It was one of Joyce’s daughters. Nine’s political reporter, Charles Croucher, spotted the encounter. Croucher decided not to run it after a Nationals MP told him there were health issues involved. Word of the incident soon reached Turnbull’s accompanying staff, including Sally Cray and press secretary Daniel Meers.

Joyce won his seat on 2 December with a two-party-preferred swing to him of 7.2 per cent. The afternoon of the vote, Turnbull flew to New England, and then, after the result was clear, in matching checked, open-necked shirts, the rough diamond and the merchant banker shared the stage holding hands up high, positively beaming.

The result would have been very different if word of his affair had seeped out during the by-election campaign – if Joyce had lost his seat, it would have robbed Turnbull of his majority. There were rumours during the campaign, but no proof, and often, unless public monies or other issues are involved, media are reluctant to report on the personal lives of politicians.

Finally, during his speech in the same-sex marriage debate on 7 December, Joyce admitted in one breath that he was no saint and in the next that he and his wife had separated. It was a premeditated confession. Staff and colleagues alike had suggested to Joyce – and he was well aware of this himself – that he could not afford to get up in the debate and moralise. Jake Smith had also reassured the prime minister’s office in advance, allaying any concerns that the prime minister and his staff might have had that Joyce would sermonise. Colleagues were already angry that their leader had been unable to campaign full throttle against same-sex marriage because of his messy personal life. It would be even worse if, in parliament, he set himself up as a standard-bearer for traditional marriage while the rumours swirled that his girlfriend was pregnant. The hypocrisy would have provided the excuse that the media needed to break cover on the story.

Drum says Joyce told him in late December that Campion was pregnant. Staff were noticing she was wearing different clothing, and that she was having days off saying she was feeling unwell, so all of them already suspected that she was having a baby.

Jake Smith, who by then held the dual roles of media advisor and chief of staff in Joyce’s office, told Sally Cray before Christmas 2017 that Campion was pregnant. A couple of weeks before that, soon after the by-election, Cray had told Smith she was aware Campion was pregnant, but he would not confirm it to her. He later suspected that his predecessor as chief of staff, Simon Price, had already told her. Smith fessed up when Joyce finally gave him permission to tell her. Then, on 12 January, Joyce was due to have a one-on-one meeting with Turnbull in Sydney to discuss charter letters – the formal outline of ministerial responsibilities – following the end-of-year reshuffle caused by the departure of George Brandis. Smith assumed Joyce was going to tell Turnbull about the pregnancy, so, over a coffee, he told Turnbull’s chief of staff, Peter Woolcott, and his deputy, Clive Mathieson. They were not in the least surprised. As it transpired, even then Joyce did not tell Turnbull that Campion was pregnant. Nor did Turnbull ask him if she was.

During that ministerial reshuffle, Joyce was described as especially erratic. He had trouble deciding who to dump and who to keep. He would agree to a promotion or demotion one day, and then change his mind the next, vowing this was it, no changes, it was fixed, only to change his mind again.

He ended up making two formidable enemies. He dumped Darren Chester from cabinet and Keith Pitt as an assistant minister. He wanted to promote David Littleproud to the frontbench, which was fair enough. Littleproud was – and is – a talented addition to the Nationals, with obvious future leadership potential, assuming everything stays on track and he doesn’t get derailed. Politics was in Littleproud’s genes. His father, Brian, served as a minister in two Nationals governments in Queensland. As a schoolboy, David says he remembers listening in while his father tried to gather the numbers for his friend Mike Ahern to take over the Nationals leadership. He says he also clearly remembers his father taking a call from Joh Bjelke-Petersen asking him to join his government, and his father refusing the offer. Littleproud is proud to recall that, soon after failing to get his father, Russell Cooper, and Ron Borbidge on board, Bjelke-Petersen resigned.

Littleproud says he had known Barnaby Joyce for 20 years. They had worked at competing banks in Charleville, and then at competing banks in St George. When Littleproud put his hand up for Maranoa – which Joyce had wanted before he landed on New England – Joyce supported another candidate.

Despite this, and although Littleproud had only been in parliament for a year, Joyce catapulted him from the backbench straight into cabinet. Joyce told him the day before, at a tourist event in Longreach, that he was going to call him the next day to offer him a slot. He warned Littleproud that the promotion would mean he ‘would be in everyone’s sights’.

‘It was sage advice. I was unknown and untested,’ Littleproud admits. He felt the pressure. Turnbull also rang him the next day, and although Littleproud would come to admire him greatly, that first conversation was icy.

Turnbull and Littleproud bonded during Littleproud’s handling of the live-sheep drama, when footage of the appalling treatment of the animals on board ships led to demands for the export trade to be abandoned.

A few months after his promotion, Turnbull went to Littleproud’s electorate to attend the Bell show and rodeo, which attracted 700 people. Littleproud was bowled over by the reaction to Turnbull. ‘They just loved him,’ he said. Turnbull visited Maranoa three or four times, and all people wanted – according to Littleproud – was to see more of him.

‘I think he was a great prime minister, a great leader. I don’t think he was a great communicator, and that’s ultimately what brought him undone,’ Littleproud said, months after Turnbull’s ousting.

‘That’s the only reason I can give you, because I am a little shocked. He empowered you. We didn’t always get along, we didn’t always agree on everything, but I had a huge level of admiration for him.’

Littleproud is not your typical National, in the same way that Chester doesn’t fit the Nationals’ stereotype. Littleproud believes the drift back to One Nation began again in earnest in 2010. That is when he reckons civility disappeared from the federal political scene, to be replaced by rancour. It left people frustrated and disengaged, and looking for an alternative. ‘People were disenchanted with the way politicians treated one another,’ he says. He readily blames Abbott for changing the political tone of the nation. And not for the better. Littleproud says he tries not to operate like that. He voted against same-sex marriage because his electorate did, but would have voted for it if they had. He talks easily about climate change, because he thinks it’s real. His farmers think it’s real. They can see the consequences all around them.

However, for a man who doesn’t want to make enemies, even among opposition MPs, because he would rather work with people to get things done than fight with them, Littleproud has managed to acquire a few in a short space of time.

Joyce’s decision to elevate Littleproud straight into the cabinet at the expense of Chester – while dropping Pitt – was unconventional, put noses out of joint, and was eventually very costly – and not because Littleproud’s performance disappointed anyone.

Chester was well suited for the leadership. He was articulate, experienced, presentable. And stable.

Chester was born in Sale, in regional Victoria. There was no Chester political dynasty. His father, Jim, a plumber, and his new bride, Lois, built their first home there from second-hand bricks. Lois still lives there. Sadly, Jim died a year before his son was elected the local federal member in 2008.

As Chester himself says, he is not exactly landed gentry. He was their third child, and then, after a gap of 10 years, two baby sisters arrived. As the much older brother, he helped look after them.

Chester is also a different kind of National Party MP, and while this has won him respect across his electorate and inside parliament, it has cost him, too. He should have been elected leader after Barnaby Joyce went down – he was the most experienced and the best equipped – but there were a couple of reasons it didn’t happen. One was his stance on same-sex marriage, and the other was because he had thrown his weight behind a woman and fellow Victorian, senator Bridget McKenzie, to become deputy leader when Fiona Nash was bowled out for being a dual citizen.

In the period leading up to the Irish referendum on marriage equality, Chester had risen in the National Party room a few times to say that he believed the mood in regional Australia was changing in relation to same-sex marriage. He always believed it would have been best if there had been a conscience vote for all members. He urged his colleagues to temper their language when talking about it. He did not personally know of anyone who had taken their life because of their sexuality, but he had heard of it. They all had. Everybody knew somebody who was gay or who had a gay family member.

Chester decided he would go public with his views after the Irish referendum. He held off for a bit at the request of the then leader, Warren Truss – and also because he was feeling unwell – and then, after some negotiating with Sabra Lane, agreed to do an interview with ABC-TV’s 7.30.

A couple of people were so angry after this that they moved to have him disendorsed. That was voted down by 28 to two. He went to an event in Traralgon where a 75-year-old shook his hand and thanked him. He had a son who was gay, and thought it was time the Nationals moved into the 21st century. As did most others who were there that night. Chester believed that every National electorate would vote yes, and in fact his own seat produced a 60 per cent Yes vote. He can’t understand the No vote in western Sydney Labor electorates.

‘The majority of people have a live-and-let-live attitude,’ Chester says. ‘Who am I to deny people happiness?’

When MPs fell like skittles during the dual-citizenship crisis, the Nationals’ deputy leader, Nash, among them, Chester was still in cabinet. He felt bad that senator McKenzie had been overlooked for promotion, so he mustered the numbers for her for the deputy leadership. Joyce did not object. She was a competent woman. There were too few of them in the Coalition.

People assumed Joyce was angry with Chester over this, because his preferred candidate for deputy, Matt Canavan, missed out. Chester says Joyce quietly encouraged him, and insists that until the day Joyce rang to tell him he was dumping him from the cabinet, they had not exchanged a cross word.

Joyce’s actions sent a terrible message to Joyce’s colleagues that, regardless of performance, they could be dumped at any time at the whim of the leader. That was not how things were done in the National Party.

Perhaps one reason Chester was dumped was that he had done too good a job when Joyce was absent, fighting to retain New England. Joyce was acting bizarrely even then. Nigel Scullion was made acting leader in his absence, and when Turnbull was due to go overseas, Joyce wanted Scullion, rather than Julie Bishop, to be made acting prime minister. This was preposterous, and not only because the entire population would have wondered again what the hell was going on in Canberra. (No offence to Scullion, who is an interesting character. After a visit to a strip club in St Petersburg in 1998, before his election to parliament, Scullion said that the two life lessons he had learned from the experience were to never let anyone handcuff him to a post, and always to wear clean undies.) Anyway, in the absence of the prime minister and the deputy prime minister – always a National under the Coalition agreement – the convention is that the next person who takes over is the deputy Liberal leader, who happened to be Bishop.

Chester did most of the media and heavy lifting for the Nationals while Joyce was on the campaign trail. Maybe paranoia was setting in.

Turnbull, who got along very well with Chester, was appalled by Joyce’s decision to drop him from cabinet, making his displeasure obvious at the press conference where he announced the changes. Joyce, excusing his decision on the grounds of geography (there were too many Victorian Nationals in the cabinet), offered Chester a slot as an assistant, which Chester refused. Chester did not want anyone to think he was okay with what had happened. Looking back, he says he can only assume that Joyce was so rattled or distracted by the turn his personal life had taken that he was not thinking straight.

Proof of just how messy Joyce’s private life had become came soon after, on the night of 6 February 2018, just as parliament resumed for the year, when the Daily Telegraph published online its front page for the next day, featuring a photo of a heavily pregnant Campion with the headline ‘Bundle of Joyce’.

Campion had become aware the day before that she had been snapped by a photographer. She told Joyce, who asked Jake Smith to make inquiries. That evening, Smith spoke to the then editor of the Telegraph, Chris Dore, asking him not to run the photo or the story.

Smith’s argument to Dore was that there were no public-interest issues at stake. It was a personal matter. Smith told Dore that no taxpayer monies were involved and no policies were affected. Dore had a simple response. What was he, as an editor, supposed to do in a few days or a few weeks, after the deputy prime minister was seen walking down the street with a new baby in his arms? In other words, it was news.

Let me hasten to add here that rumours abound in Parliament House, and always have, about who is on with whom. People talk, if not incessantly, at least frequently, about affairs real or imagined. Sometimes they are irrelevant, and occasionally highly relevant, such as when Laurie Oakes broke the story of Cheryl Kernot’s affair with Gareth Evans. One Labor MP walked into the office of another colleague to pick up a notebook he had left behind, only to find a male colleague and another female colleague in flagrante. There were stories about ministers having affairs with each other.

However, for Joyce, the photo of Campion was a career-ending moment. At that point, rumour became fact. Events spiralled. Natalie Joyce released a statement making her displeasure clear. Joyce’s position was untenable, yet he believed he could do what no other conservative leader had been able to do and survive such a sequence of events – an angry, betrayed wife who’d gone public, and a visibly pregnant girlfriend.

The Nationals always prided themselves on being like family. The wives of male MPs knew and admired Natalie. MPs were divided on whether he could survive or not, but most thought he could not.

There was a bizarre attempt by Joyce to deny his paternity, which seemed to lend weight to the snip story, but he only further confounded his friends and colleagues when he later said that, yes, indeed he was the father.

Joyce was having a mid-life crisis. Most people get to do it in private. Not the deputy prime minister.

But the Nationals didn’t want to vote him out – they wanted him to decide to leave. Chester, Pitt, Barry O’Sullivan, and Michael McCormack met early the following week to weigh up the damage to the party and to the government. They hoped they might be able to manage Joyce’s departure without too much trauma. They asked Canavan to speak to him. Joyce wasn’t budging.

On 22 February, in an effort to pressure Joyce into resigning, Victorian National Andrew Broad tweeted, ‘Quote from the late Billy Graham “when wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost” … telling words for the Leadership of the National Party.’

Graham’s words of wisdom were designed to ring through the ages. Or so you would think. On 17 December that year, Broad himself first resigned as an assistant minister and then from parliament altogether, following salacious revelations about embarrassingly uncouth text messages he had sent to a young woman living in Hong Kong whom he had first met online and then later visited to try to seduce.

As the Joyce soap opera dragged on, every member of the government hoped Joyce would see sense and fall on his sword to minimise the damage. No such luck.

Like his colleagues, Luke Hartsuyker had reached the conclusion that Joyce could not survive as leader; however, he doubted that Joyce would ever quit. Hartsuyker remembered a speech Joyce had given years before at a Nationals conference that had ignited the coalition’s campaign against Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution-reduction scheme. Joyce, who loved historical references and once asked his staff to find out the price of wheat in the time of Jesus, had on this occasion referred to the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés ordering that his ships be burned to prevent his troops deserting after the invasion of Peru to loot the Aztec empire. All or nothing, no retreat, no surrender.

However, Turnbull’s patience was wearing thin. The government had recovered well over the summer, but was now getting dragged down. Again. The first Newspoll of the year published on 5 February showed that the party-preferred gap between the government and Labor had narrowed to 48 to 52 per cent. Turnbull was way ahead as preferred prime minister. By 19 February, the next Newspoll showed that Turnbull’s ratings had crashed, the gap had widened, and most people thought Joyce should quit. The media were not remotely interested in any other story.

Although Joyce was a great retail politician, he was difficult to deal with as the Nationals’ leader, and the turmoil only made him more difficult. ‘The worst ever,’ one Liberal cabinet minister would say later, claiming Joyce would constantly threaten to end the Coalition, to pull the Nationals out of the government, sometimes over trivial issues. Yet here he was, demanding they all pretend there was nothing untoward happening. Everybody did it anyway, didn’t they, didn’t you, he would ask others. Well, yes and no. Some did; a lot didn’t. Joyce always thought it was unfortunate that he was the one who got caught, and that it would soon pass.

Peter Dutton raised the doodle problem with Joyce during a leadership meeting at peak crisis, asking him how he thought it would be resolved, how he saw it playing out. Joyce thought that if they all stuck together, they could ride it out and that people would forget about it.

Centre or centre-left politicians – think of Bob Hawke and Bill Clinton – withstood revelations of marital infidelity. They did so because there were no photos of pregnant girlfriends around, and because, in the face of damning allegations of infidelity or inappropriate behaviour, their wives stuck by them 100 per cent. Hazel Hawke maintained a dignified silence for decades. Hillary Clinton attacked the accusers and stuck by her man. When the photo of the pregnant Campion appeared, Natalie released a statement saying she was hurt and deceived by the affair.

Joyce would sit in leadership meetings, head in hands, getting redder and redder – no wonder they nicknamed him the Beetrooter – while his colleagues talked about him and his mistress and what to do. He would shuffle into the meetings with head bowed, growing more and more depressed. Turnbull was growing increasingly worried about the damage to the government and his own standing, particularly among women, where his support was high.

Turnbull canvassed a so-called bonking ban at a leadership meeting on 14 February. Both Dutton and Cormann had been trying to talk Turnbull out of doing anything. In their view, he was best to stay out of it.

Dutton later described the ‘bonking ban’ as stupid policy. ‘It was Turnbull grandstanding. It made a great enemy of Barnaby. There was no need to do that. He had stood up with him at his by-election. What was to be achieved by that?’ he said.

‘Mathias and I said in leadership [meeting] to stay out of it. We were against doing anything.’

Pyne also thought it would be a mistake. Morrison was the only cabinet minister who supported it, and according to those who were there, did so enthusiastically.

An exasperated Turnbull decided to bring it to a head. On 15 February, more than a week after the story broke, he announced a new code of conduct that would include a ban on ministers having sex with staff. Turnbull wrote it out himself, incredulous that it needed to be done and that it needed to be put in writing.

‘Barnaby [Joyce] made a shocking error of judgement in having an affair with a young woman working in his office. In doing so, he has set off a world of woe for those women, and appalled all of us,’ Turnbull said at his press conference.

The head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Martin Parkinson, was charged with determining if anything inappropriate had occurred. Where to begin? And where to finish? What could the country’s top bureaucrat possibly say? Parkinson didn’t have a clue, and was spared further torment when Joyce eventually resigned.

‘I never anticipated becoming the ABC’ – the Anti-Bonking Commissioner – Parkinson told people when news of his new duties broke.

An infuriated Joyce dug in. Turnbull had given him no warning that he was going to announce the ban. Fuming, he watched him announce it on TV, and then he and Turnbull had a very testy conversation on the phone.

Other Nationals were less than impressed with Turnbull’s intervention, which they regarded as unhelpful. As angry as they were with Joyce, they were even angrier when a Liberal tried to tell them or their leader what to do. Eventually, however, they had to take matters into their own hands. The sorry saga dragged on for another 11 days until 26 February, when the story leaked that Catherine Marriott, the former West Australian Rural Woman of the Year, had lodged a sexual-harassment complaint with the National Party against Joyce.

Senior Nationals later surmised that someone in New South Wales or Western Australia had leaked the Marriott story in an effort to blast Joyce out. Two journalists had already approached Joyce’s office, knowing the name of the complainant and details of the alleged incident before any complaint had been lodged.

Whatever happened between Joyce and Marriott – and there are obviously contested accounts – it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The morning that story broke, Wacka Williams says he texted his friend to say it was time for him to step down. Joyce resigned that day.

Damian Drum believes that if it were not for those allegations, Joyce would have remained as leader. Drum blames the media for Joyce’s downfall. He says Joyce was accused of having an extramarital affair, when in fact his marriage had broken down long before that. He does not believe Joyce had done anything wrong – certainly nothing bad enough to warrant his departure as deputy prime minister.

The Joyce soap opera had run for 20 days, dragging the government off message, into a quagmire and down in the polls. It would take months to regain lost ground. As well as robbing the government of momentum, Joyce’s departure, all of it completely self-inflicted, robbed Turnbull of something else – a strong protector on his right flank who might have helped him better manage the energy debate, both at the retail end in the bush and internally with the Nationals.

In early April, Turnbull clocked up 30 Newspolls in a row in which the government lagged behind Labor. Much of the blame was laid at Joyce’s door. While a few sympathised with Joyce, most of them did not. They were furious with him and his subsequent efforts to paint himself as a victim.

‘He enjoyed extraordinary support in the party room, and his fall from grace was all his own doing,’ one senior National said.

‘He was given every opportunity to succeed in the leadership, and for the first 12 months he did a great job. In the second 12 months, he lost contact with the colleagues. I don’t think he had any actual friends in the party.’

This was a harsh assessment, but reflective of Joyce’s neglect of his day job.

With Joyce gone, the Nationals had to elect a new leader. Chester was the obvious choice. However, they could not have Victorians as leader and deputy leader; New South Wales and Queensland Nationals would not have it. Chester was not about to shaft McKenzie, and in any case his more conservative northern colleagues were still snarky about his support for same-sex marriage. Chester had skewered himself. He decided to throw his support behind the determinedly uncharismatic Michael McCormack, whose homophobic scribblings during his time in journalism ensured a rocky beginning. Chester was restored to the frontbench. He says he did not ask for it, and that no deal was done with McCormack for his support for the leadership.

So did Chester regret the actions he had taken on both same-sex marriage and Bridget McKenzie, which cost him his own shot at being Nationals’ leader and deputy prime minister? Not for a moment.

‘It’s as good as it gets,’ he told me later. ‘Sometimes in politics and life you can lead from behind. You can lead from behind in directing votes and support for people who will take the party forward.’

Chester is satisfied with his own conduct. He knows he did the right thing both times, and if he paid a price for that, so be it. He is a rare creature in a cut-throat world.

It took until the budget in May for the government to stabilise; however, it wasn’t long before the right fired a few shots across Turnbull’s bow. The reverberations from same-sex marriage played out in a couple of key votes at the party’s federal council meeting in June, including the election of Teena McQueen as the federal women’s vice-president.

McQueen is not a woman to be trifled with. At a fundraising dinner held at the National Press Club with the then defence minister, Marise Payne, and the defence industry minister, Christopher Pyne, on 19 June 2018, McQueen was asked what her interest was in defence-related matters. McQueen said she owned two guns.

McQueen was on a high after just being elected, and was trying to get a rise out of Pyne. Pyne told her he was untroubled by the vote, even though the woman that McQueen toppled was another progressive from South Australia, the well-regarded former MP Trish Worth. Worth, who had held a marginal seat for 11 years, who knows a thing or two about campaigning and what it takes to make governments tick, and who made telling contributions at executive meetings on the imperative to define Shorten as a captive of unions, was politically acute. Yet she became collateral damage.

McQueen had made no secret over the years of her admiration for Tony Abbott, describing him to friends as her first love (in more graphic language than that), and advertising her disdain for Malcolm Turnbull.

In March 2016, at a black-tie dinner at Parliament House to celebrate 20 years since the election of the Howard government, a group of guests began interjecting during Turnbull’s speech. They became so loud and so persistent that another female guest nearby walked over and told one particular woman and her companions to be quiet.

According to eyewitnesses, there was a repeat performance at a tribute dinner in July 2017 for Bill Heffernan, when Turnbull rose to honor the retired senator from New South Wales. The same angry, unimpressed woman began interjecting.

McQueen, who was accused by those present of interjecting at both events, denies it was her, claiming she was the one who told others to be quiet at the Howard dinner.

Her reputation as a Turnbull hater and unabashed Abbott fan was well known, so when she defeated Trish Worth a year later to become federal vice-president, it came as a shock to Turnbull’s supporters. It should have been read for the warning it was.

It was the same federal council meeting where an overwhelming majority of delegates, including McQueen, voted in favour of a self-indulgent motion from the young Liberals to privatise the ABC.

When it came to the vice-presidency, their intention, as Michael Sukkar later privately admitted, was to give Pyne a whack. Sukkar saw same-sex marriage as the final battleground for the conservatives – not energy or climate change, but the fight for traditional, cultural values.

Canberra senator Zed Seselja and Sukkar, who were to become prominent in Dutton’s coup attempt, were still smarting over the same-sex marriage vote. They were furious that at the previous year’s council meeting, Pyne chortled over their diminished influence, saying that progressives had gained the ascendancy in the Turnbull government and were in the winner’s circle, and that same-sex marriage would be legislated sooner rather than later.

They figured, wrongly, that Worth was Pyne’s candidate. So they did not wound Pyne, as they had hoped, but they did help Abbott by showing that conservatives still had muscle. And, of course, they damaged Turnbull by showing that his had wasted.

A combination of complacency and rodent-like jiggery-pokery (think of Kevin Rudd’s description of the Chinese) helped see McQueen elected by 54 votes to 50.

A confident Mathias Cormann had assured Turnbull beforehand that Worth would succeed – the national right was locked in, and would back her over McQueen.

Michael Kroger, the Victorian president, who traded extensively on his status as a so-called power-broker, had also assured the federal president, Nick Greiner, that the Victorians were voting for Worth. Sukkar was to say later that Kroger had done this without prior consultation, which tells you a lot about who really ran the state party then.

When she was talking to Turnbull before the vote, Worth told him she wanted to go and change her jacket and freshen up. Thanks to Kroger’s and Cormann’s assurances, Turnbull was unfazed, reassuring Worth that she needn’t bother, because he had been told there was nothing in the challenge from McQueen.

Later, Worth thought it was strange that Helen Kroger (Michael’s first wife) had told her beforehand not to see the vote as something personal against her; rather, it was conservatives wanting to flex their muscle to show Turnbull that they still held influence and power.

Initially, the conservatives had wanted to knock off Greiner as federal president. Greiner, whom Turnbull had chosen, was also a moderate, and also – horror of horrors – supported same-sex marriage. However, they couldn’t find a candidate to run against him.

So determined were they to exact some revenge, they backed McQueen to unseat Worth. One of their arguments against Worth, who had made a few sensible comments on the importance of unity after one of Abbott’s strategic sniping interventions, was that she had disrespected MPs. This would have been funny if it was not so perverse.

Adding to the false sense of security, Eric Abetz had called Worth when nominations opened to suss her out, complimenting her on her contribution and leaving the clear impression that he and the Tasmanians supported her. Worth took it as a sign that Abetz was mellowing. Wrong. Julie Bishop, who would have voted for Worth, had to leave the conference early. Other delegates close to Seselja and Sukkar, also simmering over same-sex marriage, voted against Worth, as did a West Australian woman using a proxy vote she had secured for another matter.

There was a widespread belief from the top down that the votes for Worth were locked in. They clearly weren’t, and if the political radar of the prime minister, his staff, and his supporters had been more finely tuned, they would have seen it coming.

So a woman well known for her antipathy to Turnbull, passionately devoted to Abbott, joined the party’s federal executive. Judging by the email she sent to delegates after the vote, in which she supported the motion to privatise the ABC, insisting that the national broadcaster ‘must start paying its own way’, she was eager to play a big part in all federal and state election campaigns. Her victory embarrassed the prime minister, and only emboldened Abbott, who around that time was threatening to cross the floor and vote against Turnbull’s national energy guarantee if he did not get what he wanted. McQueen leveraged her position to appear regularly on television. She had her followers, but among other members of the federal executive, her appearances were seen as a disaster. She refused all requests to stop appearing on her regular slots, saying she needed the money from Sky.

Ultimately, the vote on SSM was a victory for Turnbull, yet while his role was not bold enough to satisfy its prominent advocates, the ultra-conservatives were determined never to allow him to savour it, and to make him pay for it, one way or another – even though their factional leaders, Cormann and Dutton, had done all they could to help make it happen.