These two entries sum up much of the character of this fascinating book, its author and his group – the quilted savagery of Tory political life, the certainty of their own inevitability, the combination of often shrewd political judgments with a certain naivete, together with the ability to disguise, even from oneself, even in the privacy of a diary, motives of self-serving revenge and ambition.

Two things give this book a splendid symmetry and unity. The diaries neatly cover the decade from Menzies’ last, decisive victory of 1963 to Labor’s victory of 1972, with Howson himself out of Parliament. And the thread which ties this book together and maintains its absorbing interest is the personality and political rise and fall of John Grey Gorton – and Howson’s growing obsession about him.

On the Tuesday after the 1963 elections, Howson records:

Dinner for the discussion group at the Melbourne Club, with John Gorton. We had an interesting discussion on state-federal relationships, on which subject John is very good.

The irony is exquisite – for this is the very place at which and the very issue on which Gorton’s destruction was later to be encompassed.

Those of us who may have dismissed the concept of the Melbourne Club as the centre of Tory conspiracy as no more than a rhetorical flourish, or, at most, a convenient shorthand for the political and economic forces arrayed against Labor, will have to think again.

Certainly, in Howson’s world, all the things that really matter are determined or heavily influenced by what goes on behind that elegantly austere facade in Collins Street.

The December 1963 entry is the first and last in which Gorton gets good marks, either from Howson or the Melbourne Club. The rest is all downhill.

Gorton’s personal relations with Howson never recovered from Gorton’s role in the 1967 VIP aircraft affair, for which Howson held technical responsibility as Minister for Air. On his own initiative, Gorton tabled in the Senate the flight manifests of the Squadron, the existence of which the Holt Government had been denying for more than a year.

The VIP affair itself is an extraordinary example of how great political crises can originate in the most trivial and even banal circumstances.

I can endorse the accuracy of Howson’s account-both in the diary entries and a lengthy summary given as an appendix – from my own knowledge. In fact, I was myself on the flight to Perth with Arthur Calwell in September 1965 which was to spark off the whole bizarre episode, although it was not to erupt until nearly two years later.

It is true, as Howson suggests, that in the early stages of the parliamentary controversy in 1967, Whitlam ‘did not have his heart in pushing the matter’, and that the running was made by Lionel Murphy in the Senate. This had nothing to do with any desire on Whitlam’s part to help Holt or the government conceal the existence of the flight manifests revealing who was on the Calwell flight or any other flight. In the early stages of the public controversy, in the 1967 budget session, nobody saw this as the real issue.

The perceived issue at that time was the alleged abuse of the VIP Squadron by Ministers and their wives and its excessive cost. Whitlam did not believe that the allegations had any substance. It was not until Gorton’s revelation that the Holt Government had deliberately misled the Parliament over the side issue of the flight manifest that Whitlam was presented with a matter in which he was in his element-the question of parliamentary propriety.

Essentially, Holt’s agony, Howson’s humiliation, and Gorton’s grand­standing, were all unnecessary. But the consequences were devastating, especially for Holt; and Howson’s account of this episode, and of the combination of events towards the end of I 967, shed new and baleful light on Harold Holt’s state of mind at the time of his death.

Given Howson’s view that Gorton’s action over the VIP affair amounted to gross treachery, not only to himself and Holt, but to Cabinet as a whole, it is surprising that he failed to make use of it in his efforts to prevent Gorton winning the Liberal leadership in January 1968.

He explains Gorton’s success on two main grounds – Hasluck’s reluctance to canvass actively, and the existence of a Gorton machine, if not a conspiracy on his behalf, even before Holt’s death. Howson himself seems to have dissipated whatever influence he may have had in a futile campaign on behalf of Leslie Bury – in retrospect, as unlikely a proposal as the proposal by Sir John Wardlaw-Milne in the House of Commons in 1942 to make the Duke of Gloucester Commander­in-Chief of the Imperial Armed Forces.

Howson fails to mention a very important factor in the support for Gorton-his use of television to appeal directly to his parliamentary colleagues. As Alan Reid writes in The Power Struggle,

… a significant number of Liberal parliamentarians had no hesitation in saying that if TV gave Gorton such an advantage over his Liberal rivals he should be able to use TV to outshine Whitlam also.

Certainly, the Gorton-Whitlam confrontation, in Parliament and the media, dominated the next two years.

In this regard, the Howson diaries raise a point of profound interest and importance. It is true that for much of 1968, Whitlam found great difficulty in coming to grips with Gorton. This was partly due to his preoccupation with leadership problems in the first half of 1968 – although Howson is grotesquely fanciful in the conclusions he draws from a gallup poll on the possibility of Whitlam teaming up with the DLP!

But throughout 1968, Gorton was very much top dog, and far from winning ascendancy, Whitlam often seemed uneasy and off-balance.

Whitlam’s great difficulty with Gorton at this stage was his comparative ignorance of Gorton’s character, style, and methods. He had to discover, by experience and experiment, where Gorton was vulnerable.

And until 1969, he did not learn – none of us knew-how deeply vulner­able Gorton was in the most fund­amental area of all – within his own Party.

Gorton enjoyed a long honeymoon with the media and through them, the public. He enjoyed none at all with what Howson calls, ‘the hard core of the Liberal Party’.

As early as 6 March 1968, Howson crystallised the doubts, suspicions and fears of this group in these words:

John Gorton works along the lines of dictatorship … John has preconceived ideas, with an aggressive temperament. He believes in ‘instructing’ public servants, conducting a course of action and then modifying it when circumstances force him to change. He is prepared to ignore the Party and certainly at times, has been disloyal to the leadership.

By this time, Howson is admittedly speaking with a bitter voice of a discarded Minister. But the entries of this period, and throughout 1968, make it plain that his apprehension, developing into hostility, was widely shared by a significant number of his colleagues from the beginning, and by the end of 1968, probably a majority.

Had we grasped the full extent of this earlier-before St John, before Liza Minnelli, before the night at the U.S. Embassy, before the open rows with Bolte and Askin – and had we realised earlier his Party vulnerability, Whitlam would have been in a much better position to exploit the ascendancy which he achieved fully only in the last months of 1969 and which was enough, as it was, to achieve the massive gains of the October 1969 election.

Whitlam’s mastery and Gorton’s decline became apparent in the public opinion polls only in September, 1969. In a recent article, the simply excellent editor of these diaries, Dr Don Aitkin, argues the theory of a lag of about six months between a political event, its public perception, and its impact on the polls. I basically agree.

An earlier appreciation of Gorton’s vulnerability – as disclosed by Howson – would certainly have led to an even stronger performance by Whitlam from mid-1968, and might well have led to the winning of the four extra seats needed and the formation of the first Whitlam Government in October 1969 – that is, for the last three years of the great period of post­war economic growth.

As it was, on Wednesday 29 October, four days after the election Howson:

Lunched at the Melbourne Club and asked the table to analyse the election campaign, the issues that they thought important. At the end of it, each indicated quite clearly to me that the main responsibility for the debacle lay with John Gorton. The corollary was that change was necessary if we were not to lose the government at the next election; either Gorton had to change his ways and his policies, or we had to have a new leader.

Ultimately, Howson and the Melbourne Club got their new leader, but still lost the government.

In the final year and a half, with McMahon as Prime Minister and Howson back in the Ministry, the diary entries are remarkable chiefly for their apparent lack of understanding of the mood of the nation and the desire for change. Again and again, Howson identifies the weakness and follies of McMahon and his Government, yet remains oblivious to their real impact on the public.

Only at the last, did the men born to rule appear to realise what was happening:

The air of depression at the Melbourne Club is still very marked; it’s the most depressing place in Australia at the present time.
(29 November 1972)

The diary ends on 20 December 1972. In all the eighteen days after the election, not a single entry mentions the unprecedented activities of the new Whitlam Labor Government or attempts to assess its meaning for Australia and the future. Nothing much has changed after all. God is still in South Yarra; and behind the walls of the Melbourne Club, the Establishment is regrouping.