Autobiographies of the political variety do quite well and have become de rigueur for major figures.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

While hardly racy, John Howard's 2010 effort, Lazarus Rising is one of the top-selling personal-political accounts in Australian publishing.

As Joshua Black says in his superb recent study of the genre, Performance Politics: Australian politicians and the stories they tell, "political books are newsworthy because politics is newsworthy".

"Their publication tends to be a major event, and their content can spawn days or weeks of coverage," he writes, singling out their adoption of a "personal, intimate tone to make extraordinary assertions about other public figures".

There's also a frankness in these "memoires politiques" which shines brightly against the dull uniformity of peloton politics - that bland tour-de-fraud of government MPs pedalling silently behind a leader - even when they're going nowhere!

Reflecting on his time at the front of the bunch through bushfires and pandemic crises, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg has used A Grateful Son to concede, inter alia, that a hyper-ambitious Scott (multiple ministries) Morrison had his eye on the prize even as he embraced Malcolm Turnbull, declaring "he's my Prime Minister and I'm ambitious for him".

The satirical news masthead, The Shovel, captured the duplicity of Morrison's modus operandi with this coverage:

"Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg's newly published autobiography, A Grateful Son, has been jointly written by former prime minister Scott Morrison, with Frydenberg apparently unaware of the arrangement until copies went on sale this week." (LOL)

More uncomfortably for current leader, Angus Taylor, Frydenberg critiques his party's ongoing hunker beyond the nation's capital city ring-roads - or what Parisiennes derisively call "Le Periph".

"There is no goat track back........

© Canberra Times