By Katharine Murphy
Peter Reith sticks out in a crowd. He's a cartoonist's dream, with physical quirks that somehow reflect and amplify his unconventional views. Small target, he isn't.
The Liberal Party was offered a choice at the weekend between a federal president who would zip it and a president who wouldn't. It wrestled inelegantly and stuck with Mr Backroom, Alan Stockdale. (''Stop leaking!'' Stockdale's leaked campaign emails had thundered censoriously last week.)
Peter Reith.Credit: Graham Tidy
Reith lost by the narrowest of margins, one vote, for a combination of reasons.
He was resolutely independent at a time when the Liberal Party's factions are fixated on the inexorable creep of their hegemony. The national Right had installed a leader in Tony Abbott, and would now make the president's vote another ritualised display of influence.
Reith is not a joiner; his observance of the religion of individualism makes him an equal-opportunity buster of closed shops, whether they be on the waterfront or in his own plushly carpeted backyard. He made a tactical error, rallying the vice-presidents to come out for him publicly - reinforcing his appetite for the dangerously unsubtle. (Imagine campaigning for the president's job! How crass.)
His utility as a Dickensian villain was deployed against him ruthlessly by the leader of the national Right, Nick Minchin, who informed people Reith's election would be the best thing to happen to Labor since the Barcaldine shearers' strike.
Labor and the unions, brawling over the carbon tax, would suspend their chronic dysfunctionality and turn guns on Mr Dogs and Balaclavas. It was an inspired piece of reductionism; plausible, but misleading.
President Reith would have been far too intelligent to rock the Liberal Party boat publicly. The worry was what he'd do privately. He would have interrogated the comfortable unanimity of risk aversion that now permeates the brains trust of the party.
His supporters say he would have asked questions, thereby emerging as an alternate source of influence to the settled triumvirate of Stockdale, Abbott and federal director Brian Loughnane. Those who believe the Liberal Party possesses the collective wit to promulgate contentious ideas as well as populism would be emboldened.
And how could that cross-current possibly work?
The polls portend a Coalition victory in a landslide. The pamphlets are already printed. The new jingle has already rolled off the production line. The messaging is locked and loaded; the soft chairs in HQ have adjusted to the topography of everyone's backside. The gospel according to Abbott - Julia Gillard will be gone by Christmas if we keep our collective foot on her neck - is law.
Reith posing counter arguments would be irritating. That sort of unconventional behaviour just isn't on; collectively those who practise politics, and we in the media who chronicle it, lack the intrinsic steadiness to cope if someone thinks outside the box.
Modern politics demands everyone fit into the same-size jar, stacked in neat rows along the shelf.
Modern politics demands everyone fit into the same-size jar, stacked in neat rows along the shelf. A Reith-shaped jar is not currently in production. It's too unorthodox. Abbott knows about the tyranny of the jar, having been a victim himself. He's been prisoner of that Mad Monk stereotype, a characterisation as invalid and unfair as Minchin's cartoonish characterisation of Reith.
Perhaps Abbott simply concluded that one textured character in the Liberal Party was enough.
After all, he has subjected himself to the punishing discipline of restraint and re-invention, parsing his strongest suit - his authenticity - into a daily transaction of using his own storytelling talents to channel the market-tested messages of the backroom.
Unfortunately for Abbott, the weekend is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The closeness of the result speaks to it, and the whispers on the sidelines on Saturday and the bitter back-biting yesterday reinforce it: Liberals who want things in the party to be different will go on advancing that cause, with or without Reith.
Meanwhile, another perpetual victim of the jar, Gillard, has survived a scarifying week. During the so-called ''sackiversary'' week, she was stuffed into various constricting vessels - bad ''girl'', liar, fool.
Gillard has tried two basic approaches to conquering the tyranny of manufactured homogeneity - first by pretending she was something she wasn't, then implicitly apologising for who she was. Neither has worked. Voters look at her and are none the wiser.
Last week, the clamour was such that temporising wasn't an option. The Prime Minister just ''was''. Up close she made for fascinating viewing.
In the eye of the storm, she went quiet. Battling it out in Parliament, the PM cut an isolated figure, taunted by the opposition, ignored by the Labor backbenchers slumped in their chairs. She was, as prime ministers in diabolical and possibly irreversible political trouble are, entirely alone.
But for what seems to me to be the first time, she exhibited the will to be Prime Minister. No one will have noticed in voter-land but up close it was clear: the determination to occupy the office, the grim desire to prevail against all comers - Kevin Rudd, Abbott and the jar-ists of the press gallery.
It may not be enough, but for Gillard, something changed last week.
Katharine Murphy is national affairs correspondent for The Age.
Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU