The summer Scott Morrison’s leadership broke

The late political psychologist Graham Little saw strong leadership as the default position for conservative politicians. Strong leaders value structure, order and discipline, offer stark moral alternatives, and promise to protect the community from internal weakness and external enemies. Margaret Thatcher seemed the most obvious model when Little was writing on this subject in the 1980s. But, were he still alive, Little would have had much to offer on the rise of the Putins and Trumps of this world.

No going back? Prime minister Scott Morrison with wildflower
 farmers Paul and Melissa Churchman in Sarsfield, eastern Victoria, today.

Scott Morrison is not a strong leader. I offer this judgement not in a pejorative spirit, but as a simple description of political reality. He is neither a Putin nor a Trump, each of whom likes to project himself as a spectacularly successful version of his adoring followers — an image that wouldn’t work in a culture such as ours with its strong tradition of social egalitarianism. Nor is Morrison a Boris Johnson (who has also been holidaying on an island, in his case in the Caribbean). Yet, while Johnson appeals to the prejudices of the ordinary man and woman as he understands them, this Homer-reciting (in the original Greek) graduate of Eton and Oxford is not in the habit of claiming he is one of them. In their heart of hearts, those northerners who voted Tory know that underneath the artifice necessary for electoral purposes, Johnson regards them as “chavs, losers, burglars and drug addicts,” to use his own words of a few years back.

Morrison’s political persona as prime minister was unveiled a year ago this month. That brilliant exercise in public relations underpinned the strategy he maintained all the way up to election day. Labor, as it admitted in its post-election review, was caught wrong-footed. Political parties and leaders have long used marketing expertise, but we have never had a product of that industry as prime minister. Nor have we ever seen a government go to the voters with most of its ministers and policies in hiding, making the leader’s image something like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

Read Frank Bongiono’s story from Inside Story -“The summer Scott Morrison’s leadership broke."