LATHAM THE LOSER

What a selfish, self-indulgent, prick. Mark Latham was the man who thought he would be king. He was Gough Whitlam’s bovver boy. Gough was his mentor.

He never held a real job. Worked, or parked, in Bob Carr’s office, and then in Whitlam’s office, and the got Whitlam’s federal seat. He strutted and he preened and when he didn’t get his own way he went to the back bench. And he wrote books about the party and the country he should be leading.

By one vote, one vote, he got the leadership of the Labor Party over Kim Beazley and he went on a Whitlamesque crash or crash through campaign.

And the Australian voters took a look and decided they did not want him. And they re-elected John Howard instead.

And Latham got the sulks. How could these peasants, how could this “uneducated swill” deny him his destiny?

And he went back to Sydney and he sulked. He wouldn’t talk to his colleagues. And he did a runner. He quit. Left a federal Labor seat at risk but they actually got back with more votes than he had garnered.

Now he is spitting chips. He says that Kim Beazley is a “stand for nothing” leader and the Labor Party is beyond repair. Well, if it is, it is his fault.

This is the party he said a year ago that he would lead to victory. And now he says, in a savage new book, that his party is “beyond repair, beyond reform”.

He calls Bob Carr and Peter Beattie and Geoff Gallop “A-grade arseeholes" for pressuring him to resign.

They were right. This man is not mentally stable enough to run a party let alone a country. At least he only broke a taxi driver’s arm. In the driver’s seat he could have broken a country.

Mark Latham is a piece of political flotsam. Like Icarus he flew too close to the sun.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005