The dangers of defenestration

Westminster is abuzz with talk of another prime minister being toppled. May, Boris, Truss, Sunak and now, quite possibly, Starmer — what a depressing state of British affairs since David Cameron fell on his sword in 2016. For the parliamentary Labour party, the issue is not if Starmer should go but when: in the New Year or after next May’s elections. His party abounds with MPs wielding knives and waiting to sink them between his suited shoulder blades. Even those who rally around Starmer do so with little hope — theirs is a contemporary charge of the Light Brigade.    

But political assassinations rarely end well. Even the most cold-blooded, carefully executed assassinations, as Macbeth found out, may boomerang in the most unexpected ways, not least on the executioners themselves. 

Australians would know. Our political scene really does have all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean tragedy, though without the satisfaction of its literary qualities. For a dozen years, from 2010 to 2022, we experienced seven premierships: Kevin Rudd (2007-10), Julia Gillard (2010-13), Rudd (2013), Tony Abbott (2013-15), Malcolm Turnbull (2015-18), Scott Morrison (2018-22) and Anthony Albanese (2022- ). Four of them were sliced and diced by their colleagues — their assassins egged on by a blood-thirsty press gallery. 

It’s only recently when Australian politics have returned to any sense of normality. Albo, as our present PM is known, scored a thumping election victory in May, which marked the first time a prime minister has been re-elected since 2004. But Australia’s political discourse has been badly damaged in ways that were once hard to imagine. 

Start with Kevin Rudd, whose policy flip flops (border protection, climate mitigation, fiscal prudence) badly damaged his credibility during his first term as PM. He was also weird. When the bloke sitting next to you at the pub starts talking about “fair shake of the sauce bottle” and “detailed programmatic specificities,” you excuse yourself and leave quickly.

So late one night in June 2010, a handful of powerful factional chiefs from Rudd’s Labor party gathered the necessary numbers in caucus to overthrow him. They then put the knife in the hand of Rudd’s deputy Julia Gillard, who marched into his Canberra office to tell King Duncan that Lady Macbeth would challenge him for the party leadership in an internal ballot and become the nation’s leader. Tony Abbott, the then-Liberal opposition leader, reflected public sentiment the following day when he told Parliament: “A midnight knock on the door followed by a public execution is no way to treat a sitting Prime Minister.”

Like many such gambits, this one ended badly for the assassins. The conspirators fatally stabbed someone they loathed (Rudd), but in the process sparked a cycle of revenge knifings in the form of damaging leaks that culminated in a disastrous election result two months later. Not since 1931 had a first-term government lost its parliamentary majority.  

In office, Gillard’s credibility drained away as if from an open wound and more than a few of her own supporters thought she was among the walking dead.  Three years of broken promises and embarrassing missteps — from a hugely unpopular carbon tax to her failed publicity stunts, such as a magazine spread showing the avowed republican knitting a toy kangaroo for Britain’s royal baby — destroyed her authority.   

Meanwhile, the spectre of Rudd haunted parliament: he rose from the political grave and pursued his nemesis so effectively as to make even a ghostly Banquo proud. In 2013, after a couple of botched leadership challenges, he fatally knifed the assassin who had backstabbed him three years earlier.

Abbott was widely dismissed as a right-wing throwback to a bygone era, but he sunk Rudd in a general election and soon repealed the widely unpopular carbon tax and restored sovereignty to our nation’s borders. Ultimately, though, he too was living on borrowed time. His Liberal-National coalition had been trailing Labor in every respectable opinion poll. Within 18 months, his colleagues had enjoyed the ecstasy of their landslide election victory followed by the agony of feeling doomed. (Sound familiar?) 

Talk of a leadership bid was encouraged. And it was (of all people) Malcolm Turnbull who emerged as Abbott’s assassin, something no one would have foreseen six years earlier, in 2009, when Abbott overthrew him as opposition leader. Soon after he jettisoned Abbott, a Sydney columnist predicted: “Malcolm — who like Beyonce is known universally by his first name — will be the longest-serving prime minister since Menzies. Possibly ever.” 

Any successor would likely face the same problems, and there could be vendettas, smears and reprisals

But it was not long before Turnbull came to resemble his immediate predecessors after their setbacks: adrift and at the mercy of events. His enemies circled and the rumblings became louder. Mind you, to say that the knives came out for Turnbull would be wrong. Some never put them away in the first place. In the space of less than three years, Turnbull was assassinated and his successor Scott Morrison remained PM for the next three and a half years before he was defeated by Albanese at the May 2022 general election.  

Defenestrating an unpopular PM may feel cathartic: the plotters might be relieved at ending a rush of bad polls and news stories. But the lesson from the Australian experience is that any successor would likely face the same problems, and there could be vendettas, smears and reprisals.