So we’ve read them now. I guess we can safely assume that like the trailer for, lets say, Semi-Pro, the teasers to the Costello Memoir (really, who thought to call it a memoir … who does he think he is, Richard Attenborough?) have probably exhausted the best material. Which is not to say that there aren’t going to be people out there who’ll find 27 chapters on the Dollar Sweets case a treat. There’s Gerard Henderson for one.
It was interesting to read through the account in Good Weekend today, a passage that dwelt on the to and fro through APEC 2007, when cabinet ministers wrangled by Alexander Downer almost pushed John Howard to the very brink of probably considering whether he might, ah, begin to consider internally canvasing his range of possible options. Costello’s account adds very little to what we know – that Howard dug in, urged by his “family”, and that his ministers wimped it – but the manner of its telling is illuminating. In the memoir, Costello slips so readily into the passive voice of a reporting bystander. It’s not hard to imagine that this is more than simply an authorial device assumed for the job in hand, this seems genuinely to represent his point of view: a man a step removed and powerless to effect the flow of narrative. A man waiting in the hope – and expectation – that things will come.
And the crowning deliciousness, implied in these pages of the book, that he was denied not so much by John Howard’s steely resolve and hearty self regard, but rather by the foot stamping insistence of Janette Howard, that you, John, are going nowhere. She not only shaped the destiny of her man, but had him thwart Costello too. Turns out he was never Hamlet, rather Banquo?
