The Road To Ruin - What does it really say?

The Road to Ruin

By now most of you will have heard of and seen the media reaction to Nikky Savva's book The Road to Ruin. The media (of course) have focused on the salacious but unfounded thought of the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff bonking away in the PM's office. This of course is to totally miss the point.

To be very clear the book never alleges an affair between Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin. There is simply no evidence for that. However the book does allege that the two of them (PM and Chief of Staff) were simply unsuitable for the job at hand.

It's important to recognise who Nikky Savva is. She's a successful columnist with the Australian. (the conservative broadsheet owned by Rupert Murdoch.) Her columns tend towards the sensible, with a clear right wing bias. She claims to have been more leftist in her youth, but has come more to the right wing with age. She is married to Malcolm Turnbull staffer Vincent Woolcock and it's through this prism that I tend to view this book.

One of the surprising things about this book is the amount of people who went on the record to talk about their time under the Abbott and Credlin regime. In my view such intimate access could only have come with Prime Ministerial approval. I'm not saying Savva wrote the book because Turnbull asked her to, but it's my guess that Turnbull felt that an explanation in the public sphere of why his coup was nessesary would benefit his Government.

The book paints a picture of Credlin as an emotional roller-coaster. A difficult person to work with for sure, but a master manipulator. Savva alleges that Credlin jealously guarded access to the Prime Minister, but also forced anyone she disliked to resign. There were two traits that seemed to get you on her list. First was intelligence. Anyone smarter than her was a threat, not an asset. The second was gender. She seemed to dislike powerful females.

The two (other) most powerful women in Abbott's life were of course his wife Margie and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party Julie Bishop. Both were subject to Credlin's wrath. Credlin sought to keep Margie as far from Abbott as possible, even going so far as to ask staff at Kiribilli House not to order food for Margie or to shop for the family.

Julie Bishop however could not be dismissed so easily. She was Foreign Minister and Deputy. Credlin interfered deeply in the policy realm. It was Credlin who vetoed Bishops trip to Lima Peru for a climate summit, stating that Bishop couldn't be trusted to hold the party line. Bishop was able to prevail on that occasion.

So to sum up Credlin was unable to set up the kind of environment that uses employees strengths. So focused on her own inadequacies, she moved on all the best performers, making herself the smarted person in the room. Then without a hint of irony she complained about the loss of institutional knowledge.

As for the public face of the debacle, Tony Abbott. He's portrayed as a dullard, under Credlin's thumb and caught in an unreal bubble of his own (and Credlin's) creation. She felt she had to babysit him whenever he was in the media spotlight, not to do or say something stupid. (like eat an onion for example). That led to a massive backlog in her in-tray, meaning work just didn't get done.

She would brief against other ministers to the media and he did nothing. Famously she let it be known that she had tried to stop him from knighting Prince Phillip. When the Prime Minister's own Chief of Staff is briefing against her boss, it is a sign that their relationship has failed. Abbott stalwartly held her close.

Abbott's inability to override her forceful personality was his downfall. His inability to assert himself as the boss was negligent on his part. In fact he referred to her as "the boss" in private. He could not bring himself to fire her, or at least move her on.

So, What do we make of this book?

On the whole I believe it. Nothing printed here seems to contradict the experience of those two years.

I must admit I have always felt a deep personal loathing of Tony Abbott. He makes my skin crawl. He reminded me of the bullies I used to know at the selective boys high school I attended. These were often the children of middle class professionals with higher than average IQ's who seemed to carry deep insecurities and only found relief from their inner demons through violence. While their IQ's were high, their EQ's or emotional intelligence were pathetic.

Tony Abbott, a Rhodes Scholar seems to have had a high IQ at some time, however his EQ remains minuscule. He's a shell of a man at the moment muttering "I could have won" to anyone who will listen and blames Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison for his demise. The actual author of the downfall of Tony Abbott can be placed squarely on the shoulders on one man.

Tony Abbott.