Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia, was ousted last September over fears that he was having an affair with his glamorous chief of staff, a book claims.
Peta Credlin was seen feeding the married Liberal party leader and resting her head on his shoulder. As disgruntled party members agitated for his removal a year ago the backbencher Connie Fierravanti-Wells was quoted as telling Mr Abbott: “Rightly or wrongly the perception is that you are sleeping with your chief of staff.”
Mr Abbott, a staunch Roman Catholic, calmly denied that he was having an affair but refused to remove the married Ms Credlin.
The book by Niki Savva — an opinion writer at The Australian who worked for nearly a decade in the previous government of John Howard — tells of Ms Credlin feeding Mr Abbott dessert as he dined with an MP in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne.
“As the meal was ending she put her head on his shoulder to complain about being tired, to which Mr Abbott said they must go soon,” Ms Savva writes in The Road to Ruin. “By this time the MP and his staffer were highly uncomfortable.”
Advertisement
Before the book’s release this week Mr Abbott, who once entered a seminary to become a priest, said that the author had not put the claims to him. “I’m not going to rake over old coals and I don’t respond to scurrilous gossip,” he said.
Ms Credlin, whose husband, Brian Loughnane, was federal director of the Liberal party until January, described the claims as laughable and offensive. She was repeatedly warned by MPs about the gossip and privately denied that she was involved romantically with Mr Abbott, according to the Sydney newspaper The Sunday Telegraph.
The book claims that Mr Abbott’s wife, Margie, was placed “in the chiller” once her husband became prime minister and was kept “as a prop of last resort”, despite telling party staff that she was willing to do more.
According to the book she was denied access to her husband’s diary. Ms Credlin was reported to have become angry when she learnt that a staff member had prepared speaking notes for Mrs Abbott, a practice she then banned. The book reproduces an email sent by Ms Credlin telling staff in Mr Abbott’s office that if his wife called “please don’t give ad hoc advice on anything”.
The book portrays Ms Credlin as having total command of Mr Abbott’s office and enforcing rigorous control over ministers and government MPs, including their access to Mr Abbott, their travel and the fate of policy proposals — all of which created deep tensions in the party.
Advertisement
Mr Abbott is depicted as acquiescent and subservient to Ms Credlin and often anxious that she was not upset. It recounts an incident in late 2012 when Mr Abbott, then opposition leader, was in his office in central Sydney.
During a staff meeting at which suggestions were requested on how the office might be improved one staff member told Ms Credlin that “the elephant in the room” was her volatile temperament. Ms Credlin fled the room in tears, followed by Mr Abbott. He was later seen sitting on the kerb of a busy intersection in Sydney trying to console her.
Ms Savva claims that Ms Credlin tried to have her sacked from The Australian newspaper because of her political columns.
She wrote that Mr Abbott attempted to persuade his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, to send Ms Credlin’s husband to Rome as Australia’s representative to the Vatican. The new prime minister did not take up the suggestion.