It was a little after noon and Malcolm Turnbull’s government was collapsing under a second leadership challenge in as many days from Peter Dutton. After a string of ministerial resignations and frantic Liberal number-crunching, the House of Representatives had just been adjourned for the day. So heightened was the civic emergency in Parliament House on 23 August 2018 – a few hours of Hunter S Thompson-esque treachery and weirdness – that government wheels effectively halted as the nation contemplated Turnbull’s demise and the next day’s rise of Dutton, Scott Morrison or Julie Bishop.
The cause-and-effect nature of leadership challenges draws most senior politicians into the helter-skelter, sliding-door liminality of it. Anthony Albanese was no stranger to the treachery and arithmetic of leadership familicide after the epic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd death roll that culminated in Labor’s 2013 election defeat. So it might reasonably be assumed he was glued to the rolling coverage or intimately involved in war-gaming tactical options for whoever would emerge as the next Liberal prime minister.
But as the drama intensified, Albanese took a call from his mate John Alexander, the then Liberal MP for Bennelong, a former world No 8-ranked tennis player. “That day when Scott was taking over from Malcolm, they ceased parliament – and so I called him [Albanese] up and said to him, ‘Well, you know all about this stuff, there’s nothing we can do is there?’” Alexander recalls.
