Tony Abbott: Can a right-wing Australian salvage Britain’s post-Brexit trading future?

A few days ago, Tony Abbott, the right-wing former prime minister of Australia, used a special travel dispensation to fly to London to meet Liz Truss, secretary of state for international trade. It has been confirmed that Abbott is, extraordinarily, going to be some sort of British trade super-envoy and “bang the drum for Brexit Britain around the world”.

The irony that Britain has to import its own trade champion seems to have been lost somewhere. Abbott, as it happens, joins another antipodean mercenary, New Zealander Crawford Falconer, who is the UK’s chief trade negotiator (excluding the EU, where David Frost is confidently steering the talks to stalemate). Together the Aussie and the Kiwi will be spearheading the push for new trade deals especially with, er, Australia and New Zealand and across East Asia, the Pacific and beyond. Falconer, by the way, commands a salary of £265,000 – plus a bonus between £15,000 and £20,000.

Abbott is also to become, with Truss, joint “president of the board of trade” – an old, honorific title recently revived to recall Britain’s glory days as workshop of the world and global trading power, and to add some dignity to the mostly fruitless search for new post-Brexit trading relationships. Abbott was Australian premier when important deals were done with South Korea, China and Japan; his critics say the heavy lifting had been done by his predecessors. Still, Abbott is a familiar figure around the dynamic East Asia region.

Truss and Abbott had breakfast and, while the details of their discussions remain confidential, it is tempting to wonder what might have been on the table, literally and metaphorically. Perhaps Truss symbolically left a big chunk of stilton out, given the problems she’s been having lately in off-loading the delicacy to the Japanese. To show an impish sense of humour, Truss might have presented Abbott with a whole raw onion, a reminder of a bizarre incident a few years ago when the occasionally eccentric Abbott ate an entire onion, skin included, in a campaigning visit to an Australian farm in March 2015. No surviving eyewitnesses (or eye-watering witnesses) have come forward with a description of the halitosary effects of Abbott’s impromptu amuse-bouche; all he has said since is that he wanted to make a gesture of support to a hardworking Australian farmer. It gave rise to a slogan about him knowing his onions, but his time leading Australia was not an obvious success. Six months after the onion incident, Abbott was ousted as party leader and 28th premier of Australia by his own MPs, not least for his unpopular policies and arrogant style of leadership (rather than bad breath). He’d been PM for two years.

Though Truss, her permanent secretary Antonia Romeo and Abbott share much the same world view as Boris Johnson and the gang in No 10, and Truss and Abbott share the same enthusiasm for hanging around the same rightist think-tanks, it is not entirely clear how their power dynamic will evolve (even if the Department for International Trade isn’t absorbed by the Foreign Office, as has been rumoured).

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The ideological connection and the admiration felt by Truss towards Abbott has in the past been formidable, even touching. At an event run by think tank Policy Exchange last year, Truss called Abbott an “inspiration” to Conservatives. It was almost as if she had a crush on him: “I think you inspired lots of politicians around the world, including me who were worried about the dominations, about the technocrats, the Blairites, those type of people and you said, it’s fine, we can be unapologetic about being conservative because we understand what motivates people’”. Abbott, in other words, is the real thing – a populist and culture warrior of conviction, in a way Truss (ex-Cameronite Remainer) is maybe more one of convenience.

But how will Tony and Liz operate personally? Working closely together...? You wonder how things might go, between the ambitious Truss and the forceful Abbott. After all, Abbott has a certain reputation, well summed up by Truss’s Labour shadow, Emily Thornberry: “I am disgusted that Boris Johnson thinks this offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist is the right person to represent our country overseas.”

Abbott’s most famous political moment was a speech made to and about him, rather than any rhetoric delivered by him: Julia Gillard’s “misogyny speech” to the Australian Parliament, in 2012. In it, Gillard, Labour prime minister of the day, attacked Abbott, then leader of the opposition for the Liberal party (actually a right-wing grouping) with crushing, humiliating effect: “The leader of the opposition [Abbott] says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs.”

Liz Truss, who also serves as the UK’s minister for women and equalities, might also reflect on these choice quotes from Abbott, hurled back at him with added scorn by Gillard: “He has said, and I quote, in a discussion about women being underrepresented in institutions of power in Australia (the interviewer was a man called Stavros). The leader of the opposition says, ‘If its true, Stavros, that men have more power generally speaking than women, is that a bad thing?’. And then a discussion ensues and another person says, ‘I want my daughter to have as much opportunity as my son’. To which the leader of the opposition says, ‘Yeah, I completely agree, but what if men are by physiology or temperament, more adapted to exercise authority or to issue commands’?”

Gillard added that Abbott was on record describing abortion as “the easy way out”, and describing “what the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing...”

Abbott has three grown-up daughters and once bewilderingly described their virginity as a “gift”. In his defence, daughter Bridget explains: “People actually misconstrued it thinking dad believes in no sex before marriage and all that stuff because of his religious beliefs but him saying our virginity is a gift is obviously him just saying you’re important, you’re special and someone should be showing you the respect you deserve and I know how important and special you are so I don’t think you should throw that away lightly.”

To complete the picture, Abbott is against gay/equal marriage (though did attend his sister’s wedding to a woman), and is a staunch monarchist. In fact, so devoted is Abbott to the House of Windsor that he restored the practice of giving knighthoods in the Order of Australia, with an early nomination for the then 93-year-old Prince Philip, unlikely to set foot in Australia again. It was a divisive choice.

The partial exception to Abbott’s habitual conservatism is his work on improving the lives of Australia’s indigenous peoples, most recently as a government adviser. Abbott’s record in office and his views are contested, predictably enough.

Many in Australia are now asking why Abbott has gone off to “work for the poms”, and wondering whose side he’ll be on when the times comes for a UK-Australia trade treaty. Or, in British terms, does Abbott pass the “cricket test”?

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The answer to that remains to be seen, but Abbott is British by birth – Lambeth, 4 November 1957. His family, who had strong links to Australia, emigrated there in 1960, as what were termed in those days “£10 poms”, government-sponsored, and would now be called economic migrants. Abbott’s father, Dick, went on to develop a prosperous orthodontic practice in Sydney. (His son would go on to order the Royal Australian Navy to use force to turn back migrant boats headed to Australia. It has to be added, though, that the anti-migrant policy was cross-party.) Abbott won himself a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, and seems to yearn for a global Anglosphere which he and his populist-conservative network embody. In short, he sees no fundamental conflict of interest between Britain, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand (whence Mrs Abbott hails). Like the old doctrine of the British Empire, all are equal subjects of the sovereign.

No surprise, then, that Abbott is an extreme anglophile and royalist, and gave up his British citizenship only when Australia law demanded it so that he could be elected an MP (for Warringah, near Sydney). At the last Tory Party conference, for example, Abbott belted out this sub-Churchillian, indeed sub-Johnsonian screed: “This is the country that has seen off the Spanish Armada, the French emperor and the German kaiser. Against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, against Wilhelm II and then against Hitler. It saved Europe, helped – as it always should be – by its friends and family, the Commonwealth across the sea.”

It is curiously dated stuff, more redolent of the era of Robert Menzies than today’s multicultural Australia and Britain, but he seems to mean it. Abbott forgot to mention Admiral Tojo and Emperor Hirohito among the baddies, which is maybe just as well if he ever has to ask a favour of the ministry of international trade and industry in Tokyo.

You can see why Johnson likes Abbott so much – a fellow “boosterist”, and in truth more of a Brexit true believer than Johnson. As for Donald Trump, Abbott has both ridiculed him (“revolting slug”) and praised him (“reasonable enough”). Abbott is, naturally, chummy with Nigel Farage, Lynton Crosby and Rupert Murdoch. The Anglosphere is a small world really.

The other key to the world of Abbott and his social conservatism is his strong Roman Catholicism, a contrast with his usually godless political soulmates. For a time in the 1980s, he seriously studied to serve the Lord, until he judged “I didn’t have what it takes to be an effective priest”. He can still freely quote scripture, which lends his normally wooden oratory a bit of class. He then dabbled in journalism and business before winding up as a protege of John Howard, a highly successful Australian conservative premier, and running the campaign against an Australian Republic.

During Abbott’s long political career – he entered parliament in 1994, aged 36 and lost his seat only last year – he has shown a talent for aggression and factionalism impressive even by Australian standards, which may not augur well for harmony with his female co-president at the BoT of the DfIT. He comes across as a bit of a showman, a bit old fashioned and a bit careless about political correctness, vaguely reminiscent of the grotesque Barry Humphries creation Sir Les Patterson. (Funnily enough Sir Les is chairman of the Australian Cheese Board, cheese being a bit of a Truss obsession).

Tony Abbott has fought forest fires as a reservist and he ate a raw onion for Australia, and he’ll do his damnedest to flog stilton to the world, maybe even going rogue with one like in the famous scene featuring Alan Partridge and the BBC commissioning editor, yelling “smell my cheese, you mother!” at, say, the Saudi trade minister. At any rate, there seems no limit to Abbott’s energies and his hopes for Global Britain. As he himself has declared: “If Brexit fails, Britain fails.” Unfortunately, that is rather a double-edged prophecy.