Malcolm Turnbull delivers a keynote address at the IISS Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Varun Ghosh expertly reviewed Manning’s first edition in ABR in December, 2015. Ghosh noted Manning’s view that a Turnbull narrative of childhood austerity didn’t really align with a more salubrious reality. He also noted Manning’s account of a young and ‘imperious’ Turnbull finding unending success – early journalistic prowess, a Rhodes Scholarship, winning high-profile legal cases for Kerry Packer and ‘spycatcher’ Peter Wright – before turning to business where he made his real fortune. Only with the defeat of the 1999 republic referendum did Turnbull, head of the Australian Republic Movement, taste failure. Entering the House of Representatives in 2004 and immediately elevated to the frontbench, Turnbull’s next major defeat arrived when the Godwin Grech affair and a carbon emissions trading policy saw his political judgement lampooned and his party leadership lost. A humiliation borne of impetuousness undoubtedly tempered Turnbull’s second,more measured leadership term, which ended in August 2018.

While Ghosh laments – perhaps unjustly – Manning’s ‘unsatisfyingly brief taste of what may come’ from a Turnbull prime ministership, he was right to highlight Turnbull’s central and potentially debilitating dilemma as a moderate leader ahead of a conservative party. That dilemma became a key theme of Born to Rule: a detailed account – replete with chatter from secret partyroom meetings and other deep background detail – of a dazzlingly popular entrepreneur who, so obviously ‘born to rule’, offered Australians a way out of a leadership circus entertaining Australian politics since 2010.

The optimism that Turnbull generated in 2015 was entirely justified. After Abbott’s loss of thirty successive Newspolls – a rationale Turnbull used to unseat his predecessor – the new Liberal leader immediately reversed the Coalition’s fortunes. It was also an optimism shared by much of progressive Australia. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Elizabeth Farrelly, for example, bravely predicted that Turnbull would be our longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies. Turnbull’s electoral honeymoon was indeed passionate: a November Fairfax-Ipsos poll pegged the Coalition at fifty-seven per cent to Labor’s forty-three; the temptation for Turnbull to call a December election must have been strong. But the love affair was also painfully short: by April 2016, Newspoll found the Coalition again trailing Labor, despite Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s own unpopularity. As the Coalition’s numbers slumped further, it was only a matter of time before Turnbull’s Newspoll yardstick would be used brutally on his own back.

Thus, the theme of Manning’s second edition of Born to Rule? – cleverly updated with a question mark – is how and why the Turnbull dream so decidedly turned to ashes. The conventional wisdom among moderate Liberals is that Turnbull’s vision was thwarted only by a recalcitrant and arch-conservative right wing led by Abbott, Peter Dutton, and others.

But, with the addition of two new chapters – ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ and ‘No, Prime Minister’ – Manning challenges this view with twin arguments: while the rational observer can’t deny that strong conservative resistance to same-sex marriage and climate change policy constrained Turnbull’s leadership, nor can it be denied that many misfortunes were of Turnbull’s own making. Manning cites, for example, his major failure on tax policy – an area haunting Australian politics since the largely ignored recommendations of the Henry Tax Review a decade ago – where Turnbull floated, then abandoned, plans to revive state income taxes, raise the GST, and slash corporate tax rates. The political danger of a vacuum in tax policy is a given: Turnbull seemed unaware that there is little support among the business community or the Liberal base for a prime minister who cannot execute tax reform.

Manning also notes that Turnbull’s enthusiasm for technology – ‘there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian’, he often stated, to loud derision – failed to resonate outside inner-metropolitan bubbles (particularly Queensland, which Turnbull ‘never understood’), and especially when such projects as the National Innovation and Science Agenda were left dramatically underfunded.

More broadly, Manning depicts a leader unable to manage internal dissent from the right – something Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser could do, just as Bob Hawke and Paul Keating managed Labor’s left – and an inability, like Kevin Rudd, to translate big ideas into tangible outcomes.

Ultimately, future historians would be well placed to draw on Manning’s account of arguably Turnbull’s worst moment of judgement: the decision to call a double dissolution election in the vain hope of clearing a hostile Senate. The reduced quota under double dissolution rules produced an even more ideologically diverse and troublesome Senate (including four One Nation Senators). Moreover, the Coalition’s House of Representatives majority was reduced to a single seat – a majority later lost before the 2019 election, but not before the Australian people lost their own confidence in Turnbull, who appeared to stand for nothing and who appeared increasingly tetchy towards critics. Who can forget Turnbull’s 2016 election-night address, when a humble acknowledgment of victory morphed into an angry tirade of blame?

Manning’s last chapter is worth the price of the book alone. In ‘No, Prime Minister’, Manning offers both a clean account of Turnbull’s last days and something of a philosophical treatise on contemporary challenges to democracy in a Trump–Brexit world. In it, Manning quotes French President Emmanuel Macron – like Turnbull, an investment banker turned centrist politician – who laments political postmodernism: ‘the idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy every grand narrative is not a good one’.

Which brings us back to Manning’s added question mark. Was Turnbull born to rule? Manning’s conclusion is clear: ‘The wheeler-dealer, businessman-politician. Whatever it takes. It is the philosophy of a billionaire, not the leader of a nation.’