Larvatus Prodeo

Well, I’ve been spending part of my Sunday afternoon reading the Latho Diaries. Not a particularly enjoyable way to while away the hours, and in fact it’s just sent me off to scrub the shower (out of a feeling that one should clean after reading this mouldy muck or just creative procrastination?)… I’ve also had a squizzy at Annabel Crabb’s Losing It.

A few preliminary thoughts.

The funny thing about the first few years’ worth of entries is that they’re actually relatively interesting. Perhaps this is because of their brevity, or perhaps because you get a different take on what is a fascinating story - the internal decomposition of the Keating government from other accounts such as Don Watson’s. I also think that there’s textual evidence if you look hard enough for Chris’ suspicion that much of the judgement about individuals and indeed some of the invective is not contemporaneous. Sudden changes in register or style are always telling, as is the fact that the guy was apparently always right in his predictions about everything.

Where it starts to go weird is when he gets to the Shadow Ministry.

The long and tedious and intellectually lightweight rambles on social policy, the Third Way, and “new politics” get longer and more tedious. His sense of self importance as an intellectual pseud grows. More and more everyone gets a definite article and gets depersonalised - “the enemies” (doesn’t appear til 1998), “the first wife”, “the colleagues”, etc - as the shadow falls over everything outside Latho’s own tortured self. And this stuff is accentuated when he leaves the frontbench and the paranoia about dirt, the weirdness of his feeling that he is a prophet unloved in his own country, and his strange flirtations with the same meejah, right wing ideologues and insiders that he simultaneously condemns begins to get more and more starkly schizoid.

His absolute lack of any sense of self-reflexivity and indeed irony is summed up by the juxtaposition of the rambling social capital rants about the selfishness and individualism of all of us and his decision to concentrate on his own “work satisfaction” by turning himself into a “one-man thinktank”. And he refers - particularly in what appear to be quite personal attacks on machine men when embedded in their context - to the lack of a sense of tribalism, loyalty and working class culture in modern Labor just as he jabbers about aspirationalism and the power of individuals to make a difference.

Crabb’s book? Yawn. A boringly competent journalistic account of Labor in Oppo. But one thing that did strike me was that Latho was the principal disloyalist to the Party from 98-01, and now bags everyone for lack of loyalty. It sums up the schizoid and solipsistic nature of his stuff.

My conclusions? I think the key to Latham is that he was promoted above his level of competence when appointed to Shadow Cabinet, and probably knows this at some level. Where it goes off balance is where his nice upwards career trajectory (his words) goes off the rails. Your $40 is probably only worth it for the fabulous reported invective and insights from Whitlam and Keating. And combining Latho’s inwardness with Crabb’s tale of a party mired in opposition - the problem is probably more the total self-referentiality of all this political discourse and its disconnect from the community rather than internal factionalism or whatever in the ALP, and “cultures of personal destruction”. It’s so significant that the focus in both books is so much within the Canberra lens, and that both are completely disconnected from most people’s lives in Oz, while bemoaning that fact. Hmmm.