Diaries are by definition self-centred, but these are fiercely solipsistic. Scarcely anything is recorded unless it impinges directly on Mark Latham. He seems to have had no reaction to 9/11 or to the Bali bombings of 2002, explaining the former omission on the grounds that ‘there was nothing I could usefully add to the blanket coverage provided by the US media conglomerates’. Surely this is beside the point: immediate reactions to such traumatic events provide important clues to understanding politicians and their policies.

Annabel Crabb’s Losing It (Picador, $25 pb, 294 pp, 0330422162) and Bernard Lagan’s Loner (Allen & Unwin , $29.95 pb, 246 pp, 1741145155) are both part of the burgeoning Latham industry. Lagan’s book is an account of Latham’s year as leader, with Latham himself the chief source, though the author has ‘tried wherever possible to test Mark Latham’s recollections of key events with his colleagues’. With much verve and insight, Crabb provides a narrative covering all eight of Labor’s wilderness years. But even here Latham dominates, receiving more attention than Kim Beazley and Simon Crean put together, though that pair led Labor for seven of the eight years covered.

For Latham, Beazley is ‘the Calwell of our generation’: a totally reactive politician who took the Labor Party backwards. Latham opposed his leader’s small target approach, for it led to neglect of policy development on the Labor side, was reactive and opportunistic, with the Opposition ‘pissing on the [Government] and then pissing off’. Nor was Latham much impressed by the Kernot strategy – the seduction of ‘Princess Cheryl’. For him it was another ‘quick fix’, a ‘soft option’ to minimise the need for hard thinking on policies.

What grieves him most was that we ‘gave away our economic legacy and credentials by declaring that Keating was dead’, indulging instead under Beazley in ‘the mugs’ game [of] retro economics [on] tariffs and industry subsidies’. Things only got worse after the 1998 election with Labor’s obsessive focus on defeating and then rolling back the GST. Latham condemned his leaders: ‘Beazley and Crean are heading back to their comfort zone, a scragging, negative attack on a single issue. They have intellectually bankrupted our party.’

Latham scarcely acknowledges the magnitude of Beazley’s achievement in 1998 when he came within an ace of returning Labor to power; all he notes is that the success of the small target strategy would only encourage Beazley’s worst instincts. Nevertheless, Latham’s account of these years, when there was no significant advance on any policy front, is a formidable indictment: ‘After six years of Beazley’s small target strategy, we face an identity crisis. The True Believers don’t know what we stand for and the swinging voters have stopped trying to find out.’ Most economists would argue that Australia’s contemporary prosperity rests above all on the structural reforms carried through by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, abetted by competent economic management under the Coalition. In distancing themselves from that legacy in the aftermath of the 1996 defeat, the Labor leaders devalued what would have become an increasingly potent political asset. Latham himself was to pay a high price for that devaluation in 2004.

Under Crean, Latham emerged from the fringes of the parliamentary party to become the leader’s chief lieutenant and ultimately his successor – a spectacular and unexpected advance. Crean is the outstanding exception to the general rule that Latham’s judgments on mere mortals rarely improve over time. Latham finds unexpected virtues in the new leader, virtues not apparent in the first 150 pages of The Diaries. This was chiefly because he was not Beazley. ‘He’s come good as Leader, growing in the job: talking about the modernisation of the Party, defining ourselves by the things we propose, not the things we oppose – a clean break from Beazleyism.’ For good measure, Crean’s commitment to democratise the party endeared him to Latham. ‘Anyone who has the machine men shitting themselves must be okay.’

However, he also notes Crean’s fatal handicap: ‘he lacks spark … something is missing: the thump factor’. Crean’s dismal showing in the polls enabled the ABC (Anyone But Crean) club, led by Anthony Albanese, to white-ant his leadership. Even the loyal Latham is critical of Crean’s handling of the second Iraq war: ‘Simon has put in a shocker: eleven months of heavily qualified positions and an endless stream of caveats, topped off by his capitulation in the first week of the war.’ For Latham the basic lesson of this performance was ‘never listen to [Kevin] Rudd [the shadow minister] on foreign policy’.

The Iraqi imbroglio also brought Beazley – ever sensitive to foreign and defence issues – out of the woodwork as a possible replacement for Crean. Naturally this renders Latham apoplectic: ‘The windbag has shat in his own nest … confirming his reputation as worse than Calwell.’ The Crean forces fended off Beazley a first time on 16 June 2003, but Crean’s support continued to leach away. When the party elders tapped Crean on the shoulder in December, Latham – opposed by most of the factional chieftains but backed by the Creanites and others as, ironically, ‘the loyalty candidate’ – triumphed over Beazley by one vote.

What is surprising about Latham’s leadership is that it ran so counter to much of his preaching under Beazley and Crean. No one had so fully grasped the awesome task facing Labor. He had charted the drift from Labor of the aspirational voter and highlighted the rift between the liberal intelligentsia and the blue-collar workers, which had undermined the winning Hawke-Keating electoral coalition. His much touted insider-outsider dichotomy demanded a new type of Labor politics, as did his desire to empower communities at the expense of the state. He recognised that the retreat from Keating’s economic inheritance and the advantages of incumbency in an age of terror militated against Labor success.

This understanding should have suggested a long haul strategy. This was recommended to him by the astute Laurie Brereton on the morrow of his becoming party leader: ‘This is a four-year campaign to make you Prime Minister.’ ‘Bullshit!’ responded Latham, ‘I can beat Howard in one.’ Yet by committing himself to the short haul, Latham elevated tactics over strategy, the very sin of which he had accused Beazley and the apparatchiks gathered around the old leader. Moreover, the very success of his early days as leader – the wrong-footing of Howard over parliamentary superannuation, the flat-footing of the prime minister on the ‘reading-to­kids’ campaign, his capitalising on his youth and novelty in the media, and his creating a new sense of politics in his town-hall meetings – confirmed for him the wisdom of his approach. ‘Phase one has gone superbly,’ he writes on 18 February 2004. Capturing Peter Garrett for Labor was another tactical success but how was this coup different from the ‘soft option’ of suborning Cheryl Kemot? Abandoning his grand tax reform at an April meeting of the Policy Review Committee – of which, interestingly, no mention is made in the diary, though both Crabb and Lagan focus on the meeting – may have made tactical sense, but it meant that Labor’s resulting Tax and Family policy was as reactive as anything dreamed up by Beazley.

As Crabb acutely observes, ‘the risk is that the tactician begins to live for tactics alone’. Latham’s first stumble came in March with an ill-considered pledge to bring home the troops from Iraq by Christmas. Unlike Crean on Iraq, the pledge had no caveats, and, by ignoring his shadow foreign minister, it ensured he was ‘not led down the garden path’ by ‘Heavy Kevvy’. Unfortunately, it also ignored many who, while lukewarm to the war, nevertheless considered the pledge simplistic. By early April, Latham recognised that he was ‘into a shitfight’ on the issue that would effectively end his honeymoon. Again, his dramatic public confrontation with the scurrilous rumours spread by an overheated media in mid-year was judged a tactical success, but both Crabb and Lagan believe that his approach may well have sown long-term doubts about Latham in the public mind. It is perhaps symptomatic of his leadership that his election campaign should founder in the shambles of the Tasmanian forests decision – a risky tactic that the ‘treachery’ of the timber workers union turned into a catastrophe.

Again, it was Latham who had urged on the party positive policies, in order ‘to invite controversy so that we can define ourselves by our opponents’. He well knew that the self-interested squeals of the privileged would help to popularise policies but that this would take time. In October 1999 he had written: ‘[The Opposition leadership] plan to delay all our major policies for the election campaign. This is bad policy and bad politics.’ Yet in 2004 none of Labor’s major policies – Medicare Gold, the Tax and Family package, the Schools programme – saw the light of day before the election campaign. This gave little time to explain them or to establish their merits while leaving them vulnerable to scare attacks. Of course, he had the excuse that the atrophy of policy formation under Beazley and the destabilisation of Crean’s leadership meant that he inherited little in the way of any developed policy.

Election defeat ended Latham’s unquestioned authority. The blame game began in earnest. ‘One week I was The Colossus of Canberra, the next a Galapagos Duck.’ Latham seems never to have questioned his short haul approach or contemplated the wisdom of Brereton’s long march to the prime ministership. He did acknowledge that the Tax and Family policy ‘was too complex to sell in an election campaign’, and of Medicare Gold that ‘the Libs were very effective in creating bogeys and planting seeds of doubt … and the strengths of the policy were under-reported’. But for Latham the real blame for failure lay elsewhere. ‘I … beat Howard in the formal campaign [but] collapsed under the weight of those fucking [Liberal attack] ads.’

Latham’s essential gripe was that the campaign director, Tim Gartrell, and his assistant, Mike Kaiser, failed to respond quickly or at all to Liberal attack advertisements, particularly those on interest rates. Latham had been much impressed by Bill Clinton’s rapid-response operation in 1992 to counter Republican attack advertisements like those that had destroyed the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, in 1988. In August 2004 Latham had drawn this operation to the attention of Gartrell. On the other hand, Gartrell and Kaiser argue that Latham actively discouraged ads on the economy. (Lagan, though sympathetic to Latham, provides valuable evidence for the arguments of the campaign officials.) This suggests that one or other of the parties is lying. But there may be another explanation: a misunderstanding between the leader and the campaign operatives. For at the same time as he was pushing the Clinton rapid­response line, Latham was also advancing the views of another American political strategist, Dick Morris, that Labor should ‘stay out of Howard’s firing line on the economy’. The messages may simply have got muddled.

The basic requirement of any political leader in a democratic society is that he be skilled in the management of people. The evidence of his diaries suggests that Latham lacked this basic skill. His personal office was a shambles. His chief-of-staff went AWOL during the election campaign; his director of communications was sidelined in the first week of the campaign; his speech writer, ‘most of [whose] stuff was unusable’, according to Latham, was still writing speeches at the end of the campaign. Of his intellectual rivals, Lindsay Tanner is always treated sardonically as ‘the ever-reliable Tanner’, while Rudd ‘is a terrible piece of work … addicted to the [media], worse than heroin’. His deputy, Jenny Macklin, is ‘as useful as pockets in your underpants’. Others he simply distrusts: Stephen Conroy is ‘a serial leaker’, as is Bob McMullan; while Anthony Albanese ‘will eventually do to me what he did to Crean’. He frequently rode roughshod over their advice, as with Rudd on Iraq, while in the Tasmanian forests stuff­up the shadow minister nominally responsible, the hapless Kelvin Thompson, was neither involved in the decision making nor invited to the launch.

But if the leader was flawed, the party he led was dysfunctional. I have sympathy for Latham’s critique of the ALP partly because it echoes a report I helped write a generation ago. There is little doubt that things have got worse since then. The party is now one of the last bastions of federalism, dominated as it is by state oligarchies with state concerns pre-eminent and state officers powerful, with the federal secretariat relegated to little more than a branch office. The oligarchies are more dominant and more self-perpetuating than ever, and recruitment of parliamentarians more limited to party and union clones, well versed in the Byzantine paths to power. With the seeping away of ideology, factions have proliferated and are little more now than power bases for competing tribal chieftains. We can sympathise with Latham’s anguish: ‘What does this Party need: a Leader or a receptionist who’s on the phone [to the tribal chieftains] all day?’ With the leader of the rebel timber workers in Tasmania on the governing body of the national party, and with faceless union bosses playing influential roles in selecting Labor’s front bench, the nature of, if not the link itself, between trade unions and party must be questioned.

Yet it is a Catch-22 situation: we have probably reached the point where, without real internal reform, the Labor party cannot win a national election, but such reform is a near-impossible task for a leader in Opposition. Fortunately, conservative governments can still lose elections.

Exhausted by the factional struggles over the new shadow cabinet, determined not ‘to die the death of a thousand cuts as Crean did’, angered by new sexual scuttlebutt, disillusioned with the party and with the people, stricken again by pancreatitis, lambasted by the media for his failure to comment on the tsunami tragedy in Asia, and above all desperate to spend his life with his sons – ‘the little guys’ – Latham gave his leadership away in January 2005. His departure was as graceless as that of Richard Nixon after his Californian gubernatorial defeat in 1962, to which Crabb alludes in her conclusion: ‘You won’t have Latham to kick around anymore.’ Six years later, of course, Nixon was president of the US. No such resurrection is likely for Latham; or, within that time span, for his party.