Smethurst’s title is something of a misnomer. True, the events of August 2018 that led to Turnbull’s ousting were unexpected. Peter Dutton’s brewing ambition had not been evident to most of us, but, as Smethurst shows, Morrison was an ambitious man with a sharp eye for the main chance. When he saw it, he took it. Though the contingencies of events and personalities might be accidental, there was nothing accidental about Morrison’s eagerness for the job that seemed to fall into his lap.

Smethurst has written the first full-length biography of Morrison. The contours of his personal life are already well known: his upbringing in a close, community-minded family; marriage to his teenage sweetheart, Jenny Warren; their shared religious belief; their long wait for their two miracle daughters; their close and happy family life. Morrison reminds us of them often as touchstones of his ordinariness. Less well known, and more problematic, is his work history, revealed in detail here for the first time. His three jobs in the tourism sector, which all ended unhappily, and his more successful four years as the state director of the New South Wales Liberal Party show the strengths and weaknesses of Morrison’s modus operandi. He works hard, and he trusts the data, with a passion for polling and focus groups. He is also controlling, secretive, careless about transparency and conflicts of interest, and, before he landed the top job, prone to going to the media over the boss’s head.

Smethurst’s last chapter is on Morrison’s poor handling of ‘the women issue’, which blew up when Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins accused the government of silencing her after she reported being raped in Parliament House by a fellow staffer. Morrison’s women’s issue is not just his bumbling of the public politics, it is also about his difficulty in working constructively with women colleagues, his tendency to bully them and put them down.

Top Blokes by Lech Blaine

Quarterly Essay 83, Black Inc., $24.99 pb, 125 pp

The blokeyness of Morrison’s public persona is the subject of Lech Blaine’s perceptive Quarterly Essay. Blaine grew up amid true blue blokes in Ipswich, Queensland. When he looks at the bloke now in the Lodge, he sees a fake, a class cross-dresser, a well-educated, white-collar, Sydney eastern-suburbs boy trying to pass as a working-class battler. The giveaway is Morrison’s opportunistic defection from toffy Rugby Union to larrikin Rugby League as his political fortunes rose. His target is the male working-class vote that John Howard wooed from Labor and that has been crucial to the federal Coalition’s electoral ascendancy in Queensland and New South Wales. Of the 1996 election, Blaine writes that too many voters who couldn’t distinguish Labor from Liberal in economic policy voted for the party that offered them a sense of belonging and seemed to respect who they were.

Cross-dressing goes both ways, and Blaine confesses to being something of a class cross-dresser himself, a working-class boy passing for middle class as he acquires an education. As with the great writer on British class culture, Raymond Williams, this gives him the double focus needed to understand how class works, and the writerly skills to communicate his insights. It also gives him family and friends for telling anecdotes, like his Liberal-voting foster brother John, who sees Labor as ‘the party of the people who went to uni’. Our class archetypes, says Blaine, are seriously outmoded, with miners earning six figure sums able to pull the class card at the slightest hint of redundancy, while women and migrants working two or three poorly paid casual jobs barely figure.

Morrison is a self-described pragmatist, with few ideological barriers to adjusting his position to shifts in the political winds, including the vagaries of public opinion, which he checks often. This opens him to regular accusations of a power-hungry lack of principle. But in a democracy what voters think matters, particularly when you are leading a party whose members are generally more conservative than mainstream Australians. For prime ministers, though, attending to public opinion will only get you so far, and Morrison often seems to be outsourcing his decisions to the mob rather than leading, avoiding responsibility with his habitual blame-shifting. We are left wondering if he understands what the job requires.

The Game by Sean Kelly

Black Inc, $32.95 pb, 304 pp

After reading Sean Kelly’s The Game, I doubt he does. When Chris Feik first approached Sean Kelly to write a book about Morrison, he said no. Morrison just wasn’t interesting enough; in fact, he was slightly repellent. He agreed with David Marr, who said in the 2020 discussion of Katharine Murphy’s Quarterly Essay The End of Certainty, ‘We knew enough about Morrison the man not to want to know more.’ Then Kelly thought some more, and he thought hard. We already knew that Morrison disliked scrutiny. How had he convinced us that there was nothing worth seeing?

In 2015, when Turnbull made him treasurer, Morrison was barely known beyond the political class. If he was, it was as the hard man who stopped the boats. He needed a reset, and ScoMo was born, the suburban dad with the cheery smile who loves his footy and cooks a Sri Lankan curry for the family on the weekend. Footy and curry, repeated over and over to guarantee his ordinariness. Kelly compares him to a novelist’s flat character, able to be captured in a sentence or two and never needing reintroduction. It was as if he were crafted by Charles Dickens, or a focus group. As he told Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph, people are interested in what you think about the footy or what you cook because ‘that’s their life, that’s what they think about’. To be sure, being recognisable is important for our political leaders, but it is not all we need from them. We also need them to take responsibility, to be competent, and to be able to think.

Morrison’s blame-shifting is already well established. But Kelly reveals another more sinister way that Morrison evades responsibility. As he cooks a Sri Lankan curry for Annabel Crabb’s Kitchen Cabinet, she asks him about the difficult decisions he had to make as immigration minister (2013–14). To the well-worn answer that he was sending a message to the people smugglers, he adds, ‘What should I have done? Not stop the boats? I’m pleased that in the things the Prime Minister has asked me to do, I’ve had some success.’ He did it because he was asked, both claiming the achievement and distancing himself from it in a move that splits off his dutiful working life from his private Christian faith and its obligation to be compassionate, or at least to try.

What about competence and thinking? Kelly subjects Morrison’s speeches, doorstops, and interviews to close reading, and he concludes that they frequently border on the absurd, with their cheery platitudes, contradictions, and non sequiturs, none of which seems to perturb Morrison in the least, even when journalists challenge them. He will deny that he said things that are on the public record, say he does not listen to gossip or waste time on extreme views, is not interested in that line of enquiry, or perhaps just pick up his briefing notes, turn his back and walk off.

One could conclude from this that Morrison is not very bright, but this would be too easy. He is clearly an intelligent man. Being treasurer is not for dullards and, as the 2019 victory shows, he has an exceptional strategic intelligence when it comes to electoral matters. Hence the aptness of Kelly’s title, The Game. The problem is not brain power, but where it is directed, and, more worryingly for the man who is our prime minister, where it is not.

First, it is not directed far beyond people like himself. Morrison is firmly anchored in his own view of the world. So are we all, more or less. But Morrison is at the more limited end of the spectrum. Writes Kelly, ‘When Morrison thinks about Australia, he simply doesn’t think about people whose lives are very different from his.’ And he believes there are enough people like himself to keep him in power. Nor does he think much about people beyond our shores, and has never shown interest in our external environment, though this is a lack none of these authors explores.

Second, it is not directed much beyond the present. In an interview with Katharine Murphy for The End of Certainty, Morrison describes himself as having ‘a flow brain’. This is a pop-psychology term for the intensity of concentration on the task of the moment, being in the zone when all else falls away. Kelly is puzzled by Morrison’s capacity to deny past events, and wonders if he really has forgotten them. Perhaps, as he moves on, his attention fully absorbed in the present task, the past really does drift off. He is not a man subject to haunting. Nor does the future have much reality, if we take his slow response to the dangers being unleashed by the planet’s heating.

So we have a prime minister with little understanding of chains of consequence beyond the management of immediate issues; and even here the management is mainly that of the marketer and public-relations guy, concerned with avoiding reputational damage rather than solving the problem. Every now and again, reality breaks through the image management – fire, disease, rape – making his limitations plain for all to see. But how to understand them? That is the question, and Kelly answers it with subtle, probing intelligence and lucid, readable prose.