The ball is now in Turnbull's court. Photo / Getty
The ball is now in Turnbull's court. Photo / Getty
Malcolm Turnbull’s coup against Tony Abbott this week proves that while modern prime ministers may look presidential, they still survive or perish based on the support of their colleagues.
On November 19, 1990, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was in Paris at a European summit when she faced a press conference about the impending Conservative Party leadership spill back in London.
She had gone to Paris knowing the challenge was on, happy to cast her vote by proxy.
It was a confidence that radiated as she faced questions from the media pack.
John Dickie (Daily Mail): Are you confident that you will not have a change of address by the end of this week and, if so, what makes you confident you won't have a change of address?
Thatcher: I most earnestly believe that I shall be in No10 Downing St at the end of this week and a little bit longer than that.
In the blink of an eye, Margaret Thatcher, Britain's longest-serving 20th-century prime minister, was gone.
History shows that Thatcher was soon hunting for a new home. After her failure to win a sufficiently large majority in the first ballot, John Major was catapulted into office on the second ballot when Thatcher pulled her candidacy to back him. In the blink of an eye, Britain's longest-serving 20th-century prime minister was gone.
It's a reminder that politics is a brutal business. It has its own momentum. Once a mood for change takes hold, events seem to bolt with an other-worldly speed.
The unthinkable can become unstoppable in the blink of an eye.
It reminds leaders - in the Liberal Party at least - of the lesson that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard learned the hard way only a short time ago: that the leadership is the gift not of the Australian people, but of the partyroom. Labor might have since changed its leadership election model, but the Liberals certainly have not.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Photo / NZPA
No matter how presidential the style of Australian prime ministers might have become in the focus on their personality as the defining characteristic of the Government as a whole, they remain presidents with feet of clay.
Their great power comes with strings attached: strings that anchor them to the party room; strings that cannot be severed, no matter how often a prime minister says that they are answerable only to the Australian electorate.
Julia Gillard talks to an audience at Auckland University about her career in Politics. Photo / Christ Loufte
The second lesson here is the insight it provides into political leadership, and the differences between leading in opposition and leading in government.
The Turnbull - Abbott - Turnbull leadership switches are rich with irony.
In opposition, Turnbull's tendencies towards advocacy rather than slogans, and his willingness to consider bipartisanship on policy issues like climate change, resulted in dire poll ratings against a rampant Rudd government.
Abbott, in contrast, understood at a visceral level what was required to succeed in opposition against a then first-term Government. He was short, sharp and direct. He kept the messages simple, knowing he would not be given the time or the media attention to create nuanced policy narratives.
This suited Abbott's skill set in a way that played to his strengths. A pugilist by instinct and training, he demonstrated his skills to deadly effect, applying the match that set an already flammable Labor Party leadership situation fully alight.
But the prime ministership is an entirely different business.
It's a big-picture business. The party, the public service and the wider electorate look to the Prime Minister to create broader narratives about where the country might be heading.
This requires nuance, persuasion and the ability to splash communicative paint more broadly across a wide canvas.
An expert in using the short bursts of political oxygen available to a leader of the opposition, Abbott seemed unable to breathe as freely when flooded with the political oxygen available to a prime minister.
And hence the irony. In opposition, the Liberal Party chose as its leader someone with an unsuitable skill set for that role: Turnbull. It turned instead to someone superbly suited to the business of being Opposition leader.
Outgoing Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott arrives for a press conference. Photo / AP
Now, confronted with having a leader whose skill set was not meeting the communication demands of the prime ministership, the party has turned back to the man it once spurned.
The ball is now in Turnbull's court to see if he can apply his skills in advocacy to draw a picture of the future that can win over not just the Australian people, but also those inside his own party room.
If he doesn't, he too may be reminded once again just what a brutal business politics is.
Dennis Grube is a principal research fellow in the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania.
Family legacy of drama, scandal and confusion
Malcolm Turnbull was born during the short-lived romance between his father, Bruce Turnbull, and mother, Coral Lansbury. Photo / News Ltd
New Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned heads with his ruthless dispatch of hapless predecessor Tony Abbott this week.
Fifty years ago, it was Turnbull's mother, Coral Lansbury, who was turning academics' heads in New Zealand when she dazzled faculties in Auckland and Hamilton.
Lansbury crossed the Tasman for a job at the fledgling University of Waikato and to be with John "Jock" Salmon, a brilliant French scholar and humanities dean at the raw Hamilton campus. They had met in Sydney at the University of New South Wales where Lansbury was teaching history and Australian studies.
Salmon, a New Zealander, started his Waikato job in 1965, settling beside the Waikato River with his wife and family. Coral Lansbury arrived in 1966. Soon afterwards, Salmon's wife and children moved back to Australia and Lansbury moved in.
Lansbury lectured in English at Waikato in 1968 and '69, though university records describe her as "Carol" rather than Coral. She also studied at the University of Auckland, graduating in May 1967 with an MA in history and in December 1969 with a PhD in English.
A contemporary of hers at Waikato recalled that she had a lot of style and confidence, and seemed determined to go places. The departure of the Salmon family soon after her arrival caused "a fair bit of muttering as I recall", one university figure remarked.
Jenny King, Waikato's librarian at the time, said: "She was very good-looking and quite flamboyant. I remember they would invite people round and she'd say come dressed casually and you'd go and she would be dressed up to the nines."
A retired history academic said Salmon's recruitment of a "lady friend" to a job at the new university caused intrigue. "You have to remember it was a small place with a lot of factions."
Moreover there was "a fair bit of sympathy for Salmon's wife, especially in the circumstances of her going. There was a sense of relief when Salmon got a job in the US."
The French history expert got a professor's job at Bryn Mawr College, a women's institution in Pennsylvania. Lansbury went with him, finding work at several colleges.
Coral Magnolia Lansbury, 1957. Photo / Australian National Archives
According to one account they stayed together for 16 years, before Salmon left with a graduate student. He died, aged 79, in 2005.
In the 80s, Lansbury wrote four raffish and well-received novels - Sweet Alice, Ringarra, Felicity and The Grotto. In Felicity, an academic farce, Lansbury may have exacted revenge. Felicity, the title character, a "well-endowed saffron-blond art historian" tracking a set of stolen erotic drawings, has to deal with her dumping by Bernie Lefkowitz, a professor of English and minimalist poet. Bernie gets his just desserts in the form of a painful beating and a public humiliation.
Born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1929, Coral Magnolia Lansbury was the second child of Australian-born Oscar Vincent Stephen Lansbury and his English-born wife, May, both stage actors. Her second cousin was the English actress, Angela Lansbury. As a girl, Coral featured in radio serials and wrote scripts before enrolling at the University of Sydney to study English and history.
She earned a steady income writing features and dramas for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A lot of her material was used in soap operas which she once said was profitable but of "dubious literary merit".
In 1953 she married for the first time to actor George Harold Edwards. She was 24 - Edwards was 64, and getting hitched for the fourth time. He fell ill with pneumonia two days after the registry wedding.
Six months later he died without, Lansbury once said, consummating the union.
Malcolm Turnbull was the result of Lansbury's relationship with Bruce Turnbull, an electrician and salesman. He was born in October 1954. Lansbury and Bruce married in December 1955.
Malcolm was sent to board at Sydney Grammar School in 1963, and Bruce took care of him when Lansbury left the marriage soon after.
Turnbull has said he was confused by his mother's departure. He was 9 and his father kept up a pretence that she would be back.
In an interview with the ABC in 2009, Turnbull said of his father: "He did everything he could to ensure that I never thought ill of my mother, and he absolutely succeeded. You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her filled with reproach and bitterness. 'How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?' Those are the letters he wrote to her. And she kept them, which is interesting. A lot of people would have destroyed them. She kept them, and I got them when she died."
On one occasion Turnbull came to Auckland to see his mother. His father had written ahead and struck a deal that Salmon would not be in the house when the young boy arrived "so the illusion could be created that my mother was not living with another man".
Coral was at the airport terminal with Salmon. She told her son, the ABC interview records: "Darling, Professor Salmon and I are getting married."
Lansbury died of cancer in April 1991, aged 61, at her home in Philadelphia. At the time she was dean of the graduate school of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
