Paul Keating never wrote a memoir. He has plenty of stories to tell, opinions to share and publishers who’d jump at the chance to help. Whenever the old feud between Keating and his predecessor Bob Hawke reignited, as it occasionally did, the latter wielded the prospect of a memoir like a dangerous weapon.

In 2010, Hawke’s wife Blanche d'Alpuget published a book about him – her second Hawke biography – which Keating felt painted him in a poor light. “If I get around to writing a book,” he told the media in response, “I will be telling the truth; the whole truth.”

Publishers were reportedly “licking their lips” at the thought of publishing whatever that “truth” might look like, but it turned out to be a hollow threat.

When journalists asked why Keating had been so content to let others do all the writing about his contribution to Australian politics, he would quip that “anyone who’s any good never wrote about themselves”. For anyone who remembered the controversial and somewhat self-aggrandising Hawke Memoirs (1994), Keating’s meaning was probably clear.

In the absence of a sole-authored memoir, Keating’s historical performances were mediated by others, chiefly former advisers, journalists and television producers. The most successful, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, came from Keating’s former speechwriter Don Watson.

The book, described by leading Australian biography scholar Melanie Nolan as a “cutting-edge” work of political life writing by a “staffer”, was an instant bestseller on publication in 2002. Yet Keating was famously enraged by it.

Tales from within the tent

Hawke’s former speechwriter Stephen Mills once wrote that a speechwriter’s job was to “write the speeches that the Prime Minister would have written himself, if he had the time”. Speechwriting could generate a “long and intimate” relationship, as happened with Graham Freudenberg and Gough Whitlam, or it could be an “enormously laborious” and painful experience, as many found in their engagement with Malcolm Fraser.

A degree of loyalty and discretion was expected on the part of ministerial advisers, many of whom wanted to work at the coalface of power and then “get on with their careers”, as former Keating adviser John Edwards put it to me. But they enjoyed greater freedom than most public servants to speak and write about their experiences later on.

Freudenberg’s biography of Whitlam broke new ground when it was published in 1977. But far from serving a public fetish for insider gossip, A Certain Grandeur offered a high-level account of “the powerful political and economic forces” that had besieged “an idealistic administration”. Freudenberg kept faith with the “traditional speechwriter’s code” insofar as it “kept the writer out of the picture and betrayed no confidences”.

A more novel pattern of personal and emotional revelation was on display in the United States, where speechwriters were comprehensively illuminating the characters of their employers. In an article for the Atlantic in 1979, speechwriter James Fallows described his erstwhile boss, president Jimmy Carter, as a “good man” lacking “sophistication” and “passion”. He published the piece knowing that Carter and his staff considered it politically “wrong” to do so.

Stephen Mills, Hawke speechwriter and “fringe participant” in the leadership battles of 1991, decided he had a “responsibility” to record what he saw. Advisers, he reasoned, could “sometimes see the politicians better than the politicians can see themselves”. Launching his book The Hawke Years at the National Press Club in 1993, Mills emphasised that it carried no “authorisation” from Hawke, and was both “informed” and “candid” in manner.

‘Get a book out of it’

When he became prime minister, Keating had need of a full-time speechwriter. Mark Ryan, his political adviser, approached Watson, a former colleague with whom he had worked for Victorian premier John Cain Jr.

Just weeks earlier, Watson had decided to abandon “all speechwriting, satire writing, bullshit writing”, and was getting ready to coauthor “with Stuart Macintyre a history of Australia since the war”.

When Ryan called him, Watson was holidaying at Mogg’s Creek in Victoria, and did not hesitate in rejecting the offer. His family protested, arguing that working for Keating would be a “fabulous experience” and, if opinion polls were to be believed, likely “all over in a year”.

Watson was persuaded to visit Keating and discuss the offer. “I was impressed by a lot of things […] including this strange melancholic sense”, Watson told me in an interview. The prospect of writing for a politician renowned for his “extraordinary use of language” was also enticing.

In the end, the writer joined Keating’s team with a view to helping Labor win the next election. Watson commenced work in January 1992 and, to the surprise of nobody more than himself, was still there when Labor lost office in March 1996.

Watson was eminently qualified to craft words for Keating, and well prepared for the ideological battles within the prime minister’s office. Born in rural Gippsland and trained in Melbourne and Canberra as a historian, his doctorate was an intellectual study of Australian civil libertarian, Marxist and historian Brian Fitzpatrick.

In the 1980s, while the Hawke government was reshaping Australia’s economic policy settings, Watson was writing satirical pieces for comedian Max Gillies, who regularly impersonated Hawke and Keating. Later in the decade, Watson found himself working for Cain, whose relations with federal Labor were highly strained.

While his literary abilities and command of Australian historical themes were a prized asset, Watson’s personal politics placed him at odds with other advisers in Keating’s prime ministerial office, where the contest was between the economists or “pointy heads” on one hand and “bleeding hearts” like himself on the other. It probably mattered, too, that Watson was a rural Victorian in an office dominated by economic rationalists from Sydney.

As advisers of longer standing departed and forged new........

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