Malcolm Colless has picked up some grumbling within Team Howard:
“We are, in effect, holding hands for comfort as we stare into the political void,” one senior minister told The Australian candidly yesterday.
“The best-case scenario for the Government at the election now seems to be falling over the line. The other outcomes are quite simply various degrees of defeat, including the Prime Minister losing his seat. And if we do lose it will be because we have been asleep and have not heard the voice of the people.”
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“Nothing has been resolved by this,” the minister confided. “What we now have is the worst of both worlds: a Prime Minister who won’t accept reality and a deputy who has no fresh ideas at a time when we need to be projecting a vision for the future of the country under a Liberal government.”
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“It’s too late for a leadership change but not too late for leadership,” one senior Liberal said yesterday.
Add to those quotes from the horses’ mouth some of my favourite observations from Colless:
This deepening pessimism at relentlessly bad opinion polls has triggered the sort of bitter recriminations that invariably follow defeat.
i.e., they’re bickering and sniping as if they have lost before the Captain has even called the election.
Mounting concern and frustration within the parliamentary Liberal Party have been heightened by extraordinarily tight restrictions on the circulation of internal polling. This followed the damaging leak in August of a highly critical strategy paper prepared by private pollsters Crosby/Textor. Party sources are convinced the leak came from a senior government member.
The polling, which recently has been marginally more favourable than the polling for media outlets, has been effectively confined to Howard and the federal director of the Liberal Party, Brian Loughnane. Apparently it has not been shared with the other Liberal members of the Government’s six-minister leadership group, or kitchen cabinet, which includes Costello, Senate leader and Finance Minister Nick Minchin and deputy Senate leader and Communications Minister Helen Coonan. The other two members are Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, who is also Transport Minister, and his deputy Warren Truss, the Trade Minister.
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In the wake of the August leak, Howard is also believed to have rejected a request for Loughnane to be invited to address cabinet on the Government’s standing in the electorate. And as the blame game intensifies, doubts are being raised about whether Loughnane has what it takes to spearhead the election campaign.
i.e., there is no trust left within this team – the Team has no confidence in its Captain or Vice-Captain, the Captain has no faith that the Team won’t leak information, and nobody believes that their strategists can get them out of the impending annihilation.
If enough top-tier Ministers survive the election, the bloodbath that follows could be something very special indeed.
ELSEWHERE: More on this at the Road to Surfdom.
