I thought I was confused about Utegate and then I saw this:
This apparently is Godwin Grech's home in Calwell, South Canberra. The one the Federal police raided on Monday and that Godwin holed himself up in over the weekend. He is a single, mid-forties, senior public servant who has lived alone in this house for about a decade. That prominent, upright, emblematic thingy thrusting itself at us in the foreground is described in the Daily Telegraph, whence the picture came, as a "palm tree". Although it obscures our perspective of his mock Spanish home, it might not be entirely frivolous to suggest that it could be more telling of Godwin, than his home.
Certainly after seeing this for me the whole Utegate affair suddenly took on yet another unexpected and disturbing dimension: thwarted love and revenge gone wrong. The anguish we saw in Godwin's Senate testimony now can be interpreted through the lens of the torn heart of a smart but desperately lonely man being found out. It suggests the glimmer of a plausible idea why someone might have concocted an email from a former protege to embarrass an enemy in high places.
Until I saw this, my incredulous speculations about the motives for this fraud had been toying with fantastic conspiratorial notions of an elaborate sting operation by someone in the PM's department to ensnare Turnbull. Certainly the glee and haste with which the PM had arranged for his own Blackberry to be used to photograph Turnbull talking to the putative author of the email, Andrew Charlton, at last Wednesday's now legendary Parliamentary Winter Ball, had me smelling a rat that the PM had prior knowledge and was springing a trap. I have subsequently been told by someone who was there that it was Charlton who actively sought out Turnbull at the function, not vice versa, as Labor's water carriers at Fairfax would have us believe. Certianly taken together with Charlton's haste in promptly rushing back to the office to record contemporaneously his star-struck personal encounter with the Leader of the Opposition, at the party in a memo that the PM immediately released to the public, suggests that this event at least, was an orchestrated set up by Rudd and his media manipulators.
But now, what once was looking like developing as a fascinating, if miserable, conspiratorial political farce, seems to have potentially transformed itself into the makings of an ancient Greek revenge tragedy, in which lust and thwarted love have by some accident of fate co-mixed with lust for power and revenge, to bring down the mighty.
This just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
This apparently is Godwin Grech's home in Calwell, South Canberra. The one the Federal police raided on Monday and that Godwin holed himself up in over the weekend. He is a single, mid-forties, senior public servant who has lived alone in this house for about a decade. That prominent, upright, emblematic thingy thrusting itself at us in the foreground is described in the Daily Telegraph, whence the picture came, as a "palm tree". Although it obscures our perspective of his mock Spanish home, it might not be entirely frivolous to suggest that it could be more telling of Godwin, than his home.
Certainly after seeing this for me the whole Utegate affair suddenly took on yet another unexpected and disturbing dimension: thwarted love and revenge gone wrong. The anguish we saw in Godwin's Senate testimony now can be interpreted through the lens of the torn heart of a smart but desperately lonely man being found out. It suggests the glimmer of a plausible idea why someone might have concocted an email from a former protege to embarrass an enemy in high places.
Until I saw this, my incredulous speculations about the motives for this fraud had been toying with fantastic conspiratorial notions of an elaborate sting operation by someone in the PM's department to ensnare Turnbull. Certainly the glee and haste with which the PM had arranged for his own Blackberry to be used to photograph Turnbull talking to the putative author of the email, Andrew Charlton, at last Wednesday's now legendary Parliamentary Winter Ball, had me smelling a rat that the PM had prior knowledge and was springing a trap. I have subsequently been told by someone who was there that it was Charlton who actively sought out Turnbull at the function, not vice versa, as Labor's water carriers at Fairfax would have us believe. Certianly taken together with Charlton's haste in promptly rushing back to the office to record contemporaneously his star-struck personal encounter with the Leader of the Opposition, at the party in a memo that the PM immediately released to the public, suggests that this event at least, was an orchestrated set up by Rudd and his media manipulators.
But now, what once was looking like developing as a fascinating, if miserable, conspiratorial political farce, seems to have potentially transformed itself into the makings of an ancient Greek revenge tragedy, in which lust and thwarted love have by some accident of fate co-mixed with lust for power and revenge, to bring down the mighty.
This just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
Comments