Comrades,
It's always a shame when former Foreign Ministers decide, or have it decided for them, to leave the political arena, and no more so than Julie Bishop - she of the nuclear powered "death stare" and the "power suit", both of which she deployed to impressive effect. The NatCap will be less of a place without the Hon. Member for Curtin, after 21 years in the bullring. All power to her oars.
She ended up being much more than just another "bloody Adelaide lawyer" who married well and moved to the Golden West. Bishop assiduously worked her way through the Liberal ranks, in what was and remains a Man's World, while denying the very existence of anything like a "glass ceiling". She's opposed any gender-type "quota's", and once said "feminism is not much use to me". She knew from the off, that if yr in the boys club you have to play by the boys rules. Obviously, lasting 11 years as the Tory Deputy Dog, Bishop was always thought of within her own party as a "good 2IC", and nothing more. When she volunteered to go abroad, she became acutely aware of the clout Australia has on the world stage, where it's seen as a post-colonial outpost somewhere in the South Seas of no particular interest to anyone, but she made damned sure she punched above her weight while all the while towing the party line. Never deviated. Not once.
It's odd that Conservative Foreign Ministers are just about the only Tories I've ever had much time for. Dries, all of 'em. Unashamed staunch Conservatives to their bootstraps, all of 'em. You have to grudgingly respect their entirely unshakable faith in capitalism, and how the wealthy will always fight to the death for it. And there hasn't been many non-Pinko's to hold the Foreign post in living memory. Before Bishop, Alexander Downer was a badly advised sharp blade with a brief comical history as Opposition Leader, before he transmogrified into a half-way decent diplomat who was in the job 11 years - throughout the long, hard, Howard era - right to the bitter to the end, when he was punted in the Kevin '07 Pinko rout. Alexander certainly had the right plum in the mouth for the job, but whenever I ran up against him in person as a reporter, or saw that peculiar visage on the telly, I always used to wonder what the diplomatic corps thought when the dial of the Hon. Downer was looming up at them in the distance for the umpteenth time. Was there some disheveled eye-rolling? Who knows. Never mind following his father's footsteps toa four year residencey at Australia House, Downer's best work came later, when he all but resolved the "Cypriot Question" during his five year stint as Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on Cyprus, where he very much enjoyed the national drink; Cypriot brandy and local lemon cordial, with a dash of soda. Stirred with a silver spoon. Like Bishop, more "old Adelaide money", right there.
Before Downer, you really have to go way way back to find another one, in that "international playboy" Andrew Peacock - another who didn't mind a drink in a crisis - who liked to trade on the scurrilous rumour that he was popular with the Ladies on the diplomatic cocktail circuit. By all accounts he acquitted himself well during his five years aboard the Gravy Train and was more than happy with the Toot! Toot! arrangements that existed back then, when he was Foreign Minister between the ages of 36 and 41. And he was a good mate of Billy Sneddon, who as everyone knows, breathed his last on the work bench in Kings Cross. A good ol' Melbourne boy, and you can't get any more Tory than being the Member for Kooyong. However, that is truly frighteningly ancient history now. Peacock turned 80 last week and lives happily with his third wife of 15 years, Penne - a diplomat and "former Texas Beauty Queen" - in Austin, Texas. You can't get much sweeter than that, and he knows it. Before Peacock - Christ on a bicycle - I'm old enough to remember Paul Hasluck, who was knighted for going through no less than four Prime Ministers as the Minister for External Affairs, and Hasluck's been dead 26 years.
But, I digress. For all I know, Marise Payne could be MIssing in Action (MIA).They say Hanoi's nice at this time of year.
Bishop could see that she would have nothing at all to do in Opposition, been there, done that, and who'd be bothered with campaigning for certain losers anyway, when the current Prime Minister thinks you're a hard-faced bitch of the highest order who tipped you out of the Foreign Affairs portfolio only because you were - as the Mad Monk once described her - "that loyal girl"? That was her only sin. Loyalty to the Rich Dude, one of her own kind. Why would you go into bat for a baseball-capped sausage sanger-eating, beer-drinking bastard buffoon, when he did you like a dinner at the last leadership spill? How quickly folks forget that after Trundle was ruthlessly knifed in the back, Bishop threw her ring in the hat for the top job, but still it fell to ScoMo by default as the party Grand Poobah's decided that that power-hungry hypocrite Mr Penis Head was just as unelectable as Mr Malcolm. By failing to even remotely seriously consider her as a "compromise candidate", the Tory eejits very wrongly assumed that 'resting bitch face' is also unelectable. Bishop may/may not have given Uncle Bill a run for his money in the upcoming election, but at least she most likely would have saved the Conservatives from the now inevitable electoral catastrophe. Who knows? No use wasting time over spilled Scotch. Don't know that she'll hold any grudges, but at least Julie knew what she stood for. And it wasn't for fundamentalist tongue-speaking filthy lucre-grubbing right-wing hardliners. She's a self-confessed "Menziesite", and she knows what a forked tongue looks like.
Vale.
