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I wasn't going to talk about the Latham Diaries on my blog, mainly because I'd already done a piss-take of them a few months ago, but also because I couldn't really think of anything to say about them. I'm halfway through the diaries, I saw his interviews on Enough Rope and Lateline, and I just don't get what the fuss is about. I don't get why people are surprised that Mark Latham trashed his party, that he uses crude language, that he insults his allies in the party and his enemies in Parliament and the news media. I don't get how Latham has trashed Labor's reputation, I don't get how he's vindicated those who voted against him and I really don't get why he's being called a whorebag and a nutbar and being diagnosed with diseases ranging from bi-polar disorder to depression.

Just what exactly did people think the personal diaries of the leader of the Opposition in a losing campaign would contain? Glowing praise for Kim Beazley, the man who gutted Latham's education policy before the 1998 election and whose small target strategy and lack of vision cost Labor the 2001 election? Pats on the head for Simon Crean, whose ineptitude as leader was leading Labor to a massacre before Latham was installed as leader? Thumbs up to the Tasmanian Labor Premier who put political interests ahead of his state and the Labor cause? A verbal blowjob to the media who swallowed the Liberal's campaign propaganda and who threatened to publically humiliate Latham by running stories on a bucks night video that didn't even EXIST?


The Glorious Leader

Latham has been portrayed in the media as the sole reason Labor lost the 2004 election. The press gallery say Australia wasn't ready to trust such a 'loose cannon' with the Lodge, that Latham was too 'unpredictable', that he was 'immature'.

Let's think about this for a moment. Australia knew about Latham breaking a taxi driver's arm, they knew about the... colourful names he'd given to the Liberal Party and to the leader of the Free World ('conga line of suckholes', 'dangerous and irresponsible'), yet he was STILL polling with a 66% approval rating in the months after he was elected leader. EVERY criticism of Latham's supposed personality flaws was public record and yet he was STILL the most popular Opposition leader since Bob Hawke.

Did Australia suddenly realise Latham was a dangerous taxi-driver arm-breaking swearing nutbar from January of 2004 to the election in October?

Or maybe, just maybe, did the fact that the Labor Party run the most inept campaign since their inept campaign in 2001 have something to do with it? Rather than blaming Latham's personality faults, maybe it had more to do with Labor not countering the Government's 'LABOR WILL RAISE INTEREST RATES TO 400%' ads for the entire length of the campaign? Or maybe it was Labor wasting time attacking Peter Costello on television, while 'L-Plate Latham' ads ran unopposed?

At the start of the campaign, Labor had a 4% lead in most polls. Latham's satisfaction rating was at a comfortable level. If you believe the stuff written about the election since then, in five weeks of an election campaign, Mark Latham went from the alternative Prime Minister to an idiotic renegade loose cannon who nobody in their right mind would trust to run the country. And that of course, was entirely his fault.

(Even though nobody cared about those same fatal personality flaws at the start of the year, when he had some of the highest approval ratings for an Opposition Leader in history, or at the start of the campaign, when Labor was polling four points higher than the Government.)

They say history is written by the winners, and that has never been truer than in the case of Mark Latham. Latham is being attacked for publishing his diaries because his version of the truth conflicts with that of the establishment. Simple as that.