Innuendo ventured, nothing gained

Andrew Bolt continues to rake over the ‘connection’ between Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Bruce Wilson/AWU scandal...

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald has typically run dead on this scandal, although it curiously ran this video as the news started to break into the mainstream media. It is an interview with Peter Gordon, who was Gillard’s boss at the time and gives this oddly indirect character reference:

I think she has a very robust sense of her own integrity and she prefers that view to those who would assail it.

Gordon is silent on his own view of that integrity.

That’s actually, er, less than correct.  About half a minute earlier in the same video, Gordon in fact says of Gillard...

I do recall about her that she was always very steadfast about her own integrity, even when it was under attack. I think she’s got a very balanced inner sense of what her mission is, and what’s right and wrong.

In their entirety, Gordon’s remarks about Gillard could frankly almost be described as ‘glowing’.

That’s particularly interesting considering that, according to the Gillard biography Bolt himself cites, there were “tensions between Peter Gordon and Bernard Murphy, and Gillard was a Murphy ally.” (Jacqueline Kent, The Making of Julia Gillard, Viking, 2009, p. 93.)

But Gordon’s somewhat glowing estimation of Gillard is, of course, rather inconvenient to the narrative Bolt wants to construct in his post — namely, that Gillard allegedly left Slater & Gordon under (unspecified) disgraceful circumstances.

Sadly for our good Doctor Easychair, all he has is innuendo, informed by his standard selective presentation of material.

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POSTSCRIPT

When you want to move on from your present employer, ask for the kind of “oddly indirect character reference” like the one Peter Gordon gave for Julia Gillard.