Lynton Crosby

Well, I'm a creature of inertia in the sense that once I plomp somewhere and I'm sort of okay and happy there, I don't tend to, whatever reason, suddenly proactively decide, oh, I've now got to change and go somewhere else.

I think what happened is we fell into a pretty good team I think coalesced around the PM both in the department as well as in the office and at party headquarters because this was in the era of people like Linton Crosby for example and Tex remember Tex yep and and so it was a good team and and it felt like we had a good rhythm and yeah it's like in in any sport you know you've got a good team and you're getting on There's no real incentive to sort of jump off.

So for me, nine years in one sense went very quickly.

Well, it

Gabriel, what have you made of the Prime Minister's approach to his comms?

Well, to be honest, the, um, great Tory election gurus, uh, Lynton Crosby and Isaac Levita, used to say, "Loose links, loose lips, sink ships." And I think that rule definitely is going to apply to Andy Burnham.

In the Man City case, he said it directly after his conference speech.

I mean, I was in the room for that.

And psychologically, you know, one that I, yeah, will won't go unnoticed, I suspect, in Conservative HQ.

Well, and that's so interesting because we've talked a few times this week, Chris, about that, that idea, but also the name Linton Crosby's been mentioned a few times.

Like the-

That was my, I, I mentioned Linton Crosby

... yeah, the Conservatives', um, old Australian, um, polling and elections guru, and he had a phrase that polls are actors.

In other words, these opinion polls aren't just like a sample of people's views.

Yeah.

That you remember that old line, we've talked about this on Newscast before, the Salient and Crosby, the Conservative strategist, Wizard of Oz as, as some have, uh, dubbed him.

Uh, I think he was seen to be the author of the phrase taking the barnacles off the boat about ensuring a party didn't go into an election with bits of policy that were just gonna cause them a lot of grief.

I think she feels like she's scraped the Reform barnacles off the Conservative boat, you know, that Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, and others have gone.

Once I got this material and I worked it out with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I then thought that I could look at politics with a fresh eye.

So I was almost relieved of the burden by the time I was writing this book of thinking, you know, what a Paul Erickson or a Mark Texter or a Tim Gartrell or, you know, or Linton Crosby had told me in the past, what a Rod Cameron had told me, and then what a Hawke or a or a Howard or a Keating or a Rudd had told me about politics and how politics relates to Australia.

So the tree, as I said, includes every Australian.

And the key point in the tree is time on country.

Mm-hmm.

Is, my, my thought was perhaps, and this is obviously not what Number 10 are saying, but is this one of those policies that, like Linton Crosby said to do Cameron barnacle, just chips and barnacles off the boat, that Andy Burnham needs to get rid of to sort of ensure he has a, a sleek vessel ready for a, ready for an election?

Yeah, because, um, I'm glad you've, uh, explained the barnacle thing, because I'd, I'd, it needed to be explained.

And so-