In June of last year I published an article by Hal Colebatch in the magazine I then edited, The New Observer, titled “What Gives with Latham?” (henrythornton.com also carried it, linked here).  In the light of all that has happened in the intervening period it must easily count, for all the millions of words scribbled about the man in 2004, as probably the single most perceptive take on “mad Mark” out of the whole colossal pile of news reports, editorials, columns, profiles and books we have been subjected to.

The theme of the Colebatch piece has never been more important and potent than now, while the party he led to disaster ponders over what went wrong and where it goes from here. I would suggest that the venom in Mark’s making is at the heart of the darkness that has simmered for too long in the Labor Party and has more recently almost overtaken it. Going further, I would nominate Whitlam as the arch brew master of this poisonous mix, Mark’s surrogate father figure, and Whitlam’s disciple in invective, Paul Keating, as the chief conveyor, of Whitlam’s legacy; that is, of course, until Latham’s ascendance.

The ALP really is at crossroads, as it mulls over its next leader, and its not about the next election, its about finally jettisoning, once and for all, the class-based hate-mongering of its cultural leftwing “true believers”, dumping “the rage” and looking around at the society that is Australia today – a hugely successful, liberal democratic society composed almost wholly of instinctively aspiring and happy citizens and, something obvious to those who travel or read widely, the envy of the world.

Colebatch, one of Australia’s most politically incorrect and thus underrated commentators, started off his piece with the words: “It is now obvious there are some odd things about Mark Latham. Quite a few of them actually. I’ve tried to figure out what it is that makes this man tick…I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a complex man with serious problems. His most obvious problem, it seems to me, is that he’s not a particularly nice man. That, of course, might be in his favour in an election year, given the old adage….”

Well, needless to say, it wasn’t. But not just because he isn’t a particularly nice man; he is, after all, a particularly weird man as well and it seems reasonable to assume that the electorate, who were not exactly experiencing desperation at the time, were smart enough to pick up enough signs to know that they didn’t like him and certainly didn’t want him as their leader. The very same signs, it seems, that convinced most of the press gallery and the overwhelmingly leftwing intellectual establishment of this country that they did like him, and liked him so much that some prominent types even imbued him with messiah-like attributes.

When I say that his electoral poison and his general weirdness should have been bleatingly obvious from the very start (at least to anyone who read Maxime Mckew’s interview with him in the Bulletin in June 2002 when he proudly boasted that he was a hater and brought his children up the same way), I’m not being smug. I wrote it at the time of his elevation to the leadership and had no reason to change my mind as he proceeded on his ever more confusing path to oblivion. And please, let’s not be piously sentimental on this matter, the fact that the man is sick and down is no reason to shelve our judgement or our profound relief that he wasn’t elected.

That Latham, at his appropriately muddled and messy farewell street press conference - where he looked, in his new horror haircut, the spitting image of Marlon Brando playing Kurtz in Latham’s favourite movie Apocalypse Now (a reference picked up from Colebatch’s piece in an excellent feature by Paul Daley in this week’s Bulletin – although it’s a shame they can’t spell “apocalypse”), should blame the media for his undoing is all of a piece, the ultimate narcissist after all never accepts responsibility for anything. In fact, as any close follower of the media coverage of Latham’s year as Leader would have to concede, he had as pretty much a dream run from the start (documented in fascinating detail by Gerard Henderson in the current Sydney Institute Quarterly).

As Colebatch wrote in his piece, “…the point about Kurtz (whom Latham identifies with) – loosely based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – is that he is intellectually sane but has been driven mad ethically and has decided that in war one must make an ally of horror. Conrad’s Kurtz is driven to desperation and death by the intractability of Africans who do not accept his civilizing mission. “Exterminate all the brutes!” the former idealist scrawls in his journal, dying with a cry of “The horror! The horror! In Apocalypse Now, Brando’s Colonel Kurtz believes he could win the war if the fools back in Washington would listen to him. The Montnagard tribesmen follow him unquestionably (even though he slaughters a lot of them). He is the toughest guy in the film.” In politics, Latham’s hero, besides Whitlam, was Richard Nixon.

In a brilliant piece in the Australian last week (January 20), Paddy McGuinness pronounced that “Latham’s early departure from the leadership of the Labor Party marks not only the end of his political career but the end of Whitlamism in Labor politics”. McGuinness goes on: “Carefully nurtured over the past 25 years by the Great Leader, cutting his teeth as an assistant in the preparation of the authorised history of the Leader’s achievements, cultivating the same electorate and anointed by him as a worthy successor who would take the Labor Party back to power so it could suitably celebrate the Leader’s eventual canonisation, Latham has proved not up to the job.”

McGuinness notes the historically propitious timing of Latham’s departure: “It is a fascinating coincidence that the release of the 1974 Whitlam cabinet documents, which establish conclusively when and how foolishly the Great Man began to commit political suicide, came just before Latham’s own political suicide. Latham has clearly understood none of the documents he studied for the official history. His hubris was a lesser version of Whitlam’s own.”

I’ve never thought that Whitlam was a particularly nice man, like his protégé he is a hater and a narcissist and I believe has had a poisonous influence both on the Labor Party and the whole concept of a civil society. Twenty years ago (November 15, 1985), I wrote in my then Melbourne Herald column: “I should, I suppose, declare my own reading of Whitlam. I don’t particularly like him or, more to the point, what he stands for. And what he stands for, as far as I can see, is a form of political brutalism that manifests itself in he style of a bumptious bully who affects a wit which when examined is little more than cheap sarcasm and abuse interlaced with an egotism whose expression knows no bounds.”

“From afar, Whitlam seems impressive. My own disillusionment with the Whitlam image came rather forcefully soon after my arrival in Australia during the week before the 1977 federal election. I was particularly horrified with what can only be described as the crude abuse he spewed out in that campaign against the refugees of Indochina, at that very moment risking their lives in the tens of thousands in order to escape a communist tyranny. From that moment on I’ve always had difficulty accepting the many claims made on his behalf, claims extolling his limitless compassion for the underdog and his personal decency. Since then, I’ve noted his wayward and selective interest in the suffering of mankind ….. I am not a fan, groupie-like giggling at the feet of ‘the anointed one’ is not my cup of tea …”

Keating too, although his somewhat better grasp of economic realities must count in his favour, has also spread the bad oil in the form of runaway egotism, contempt for ordinary people and a penchant for vile invective. One can only hope that Latham’s spectacular fall from grace puts an end to a tradition of hate-filled egotism and an ideology at odds with reality and intellectual seriousness.

Ms Gillard has demonstrated her membership of the Whitlam-Keating-Latham tradition with her weekend call for the usual stridency and her mad entry into another bunfight with Beazley supporters. If she is so talented, as her Labor colleagues have diplomatically claimed over the last few weeks, how is that that she screams rather than speaks, sneers rather than smiles, has showed unerring devotion to a mad man while her only election bid was a health scheme that sunk before it was launched. Forget it.

Now that Rudd has declared that he won’t contest the leadership, Kim Beazley is a shoe-in. What Beazley has going for him is that he is a normal human being, devoid of the spite and bile of his predecessors (Hawke, ham that he still is, was popular for the simple reason that he wasn’t a monster, and good on it for that). As Kim’s father, a Labor Minister in Whitlam’s cabinet (but no fan to his credit), observed some years ago: “When I joined the Labor party it was composed of the cream of the working class, today it is composed of the dregs of the middle class”.

Those dregs – probably some 10% of the population for whom Australia is a cruel, racist and unfair society – will never be happy or satisfied. They are the “New Class” of comfortably off urban-dwellers who pine for the days of the anti-Vietnam demo days and luxuriate in their moral superiority to all and sundry. They are joined by a new generation, intellectually filleted by the New Class in our universities and the ABC, whose pantheon of heroes includes such characters as Bob Brown, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and, latterly, Michael Moore. Beazley will be a great success if he takes his father’s advice and leaves the permanently disenchanted to their own devices.

As for the Biff, the script of Apocalypse Now is rich in apt quotes. The narrator/hero Captain Willard gives this advice to the crew of the gunboat as they meander up river: “Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right….Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fucking program.”

  
Anthony McAdam was for many years a prominent journalist, first with the BBC World Service, then Radio Australia, as a columnist with The Age, then the Melbourne Herald, a feature writer for the Bulletin and a media columnist with Quadrant magazine ("The Watchman"). Most recently he was editor of The New Observer. He has contributed to a large range of international journals, including The New Statesman, the Daily Telegraph (London) and the Asian Wall Street Journal.