A Long Hard Look At An Event, The Latham-Howard Handshake

In which a single action is scrutinized to show how ambiguous a thing an event can be.
Wanted: a used event, somewhere in the limbo between stale news, definitive history or disappearance
altogether from historical recollection.

Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best
discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s
real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.
—Plutarch, Life of Alexander

History is hard to feel when it is happening but hell, this is it.

—Guy Rundle, Down To The Crossroads, 249

From memory: I was watching the news on ABC TV the night before the 2004 election. It
must have been October 8th. Mark Latham walked out the door of a radio studio, an ABC studio as it
turned out, met John Howard the incumbent PM, who looked like he was about to go in, and the two
men shook hands. Latham did it firmly, vigorously, heartily, or aggressively. It’s hard to tell which
from the video. Opinions differ. I don’t remember any voiceover making any comment on the
handshake, but I do remember noticing what I took to be Latham’s exaggerated hearty goodwill. It
seemed like a kind of overdone sportsmanship from a party leader facing defeat and cracking hardy.
The election followed, the Liberals won control of both the lower house and the Senate. 1
Some time later, maybe months, maybe a year or so, I heard the Liberal pandit Grahame
Morris (I think it was Grahame Morris) on the radio, comment on that handshake. I think Morris said
something like the handshake sealed Latham’s fate, or if Latham hadn’t already lost the election that
handshake lost it for him, or it was emblematic of why Latham lost. Whether he said all those things
then, I don’t know, but I was to hear them all in time, offered up by the hindsight of posterity. I was
shocked. I didn’t quite know what Morris was talking about. What was it about that handshake? What
was Morris going on about? Perhaps I had missed comments on or criticism of Latham’s handshake at
the time, perhaps the media had registered it as a campaign gaffe, perhaps criticism of Latham’s
handshake had buzzed through the Coalition at the time, but if so, why? And wasn’t it too late in the
campaign for any of it to take off and take up airtime, let alone affect the election result? Where had I
been? Surely I had, in E.P. Thompson’s words, ‘lived through these times’. But was I just a ‘deluded
follower’? 2 I felt I had to rescue myself now from the condescension of this posterity.
Meanwhile the electorate ‘had spoken’. And by the time I heard Morris, the boot had been so
well and truly and gleefully put into Latham’s political corpse by pretty much everyone — Liberal,
press, and Labor — he was beyond condescension: history itself had voted.
In late 2008 I watched the ABC documentary The Howard Years. Liberal ministers and
advisers reminisce about Howard and their time in his government. Not a critical history, at its best it
is a video record of conservative oral history: a documentary of the memories of conservative players
who lived through the times, interviews intercut with actual footage of those Howard years. At worst it
is a celebration, a history told by those who ruled for 10 years, with a voice-of-history voiceover.
George Bush and Tony Blair add occasional comments on Howard’s character. I saw the handshake
footage again. It had become an iconic moment, a gesture for a Plutarch to hang a life on. Latham was
hung on this one. Flabbergasted, Howard’s Communications Minister, Helen Coonan needed to mix
her metaphors to describe it: ‘It was only a matter of giving him [Latham] enough rope and … er, you
know … he’d blow up’. Howard says he knew that handshake was coming. ‘This bloke’ had done it
before, off-camera at their leaders debate. We see a shot of the two shaking hands at Channel 9 before
the debate, the clinch obscured by someone passing in the foreground. Howard claimed to have fished
for the later handshake at the studio door and that Latham bit. I guess it was then just a matter of
reeling him in. Howard ‘knew’ that handshake ‘offended a very large number of women’.

Most of this little history so far is from memory, which is famously unreliable — my memory
of seeing the original TV footage, and of what people have said since on radio and television. I am
pretty sketchy about 8 October 2004 and the Grahame Morris interview, but such remembering is an

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historical event itself, an act of the times. History passes through experience, then the blood and brains
of memory, then out it comes out in words. 3 Memory is all or most of what people who live through
the times have. Each of us is like that old man in the little Borges fable, a Saxon, dying in a
churchyard and taking with him the last images, his alone, of the pagan past that will die with him.
One memory I am pretty sure about is that I was shocked when I first heard Morris’s claim about the
significance of the handshake. I was surprised at the assumptions that Latham had done anything
untoward, that any voters had thought that he had done something untoward, that the handshake was
pivotal in or at least emblematic of the 2004 election result, and at the implication that Latham had
thereby, to use media talk, committed a gaffe 4 . Meanwhile I wasn’t at all sure just what, if anything,
Latham had done wrong, and I was suspicious of others who claimed to know exactly what he had
done. At first I found that no one spelt it out. Whatever it was seemed to be so obvious to Morris and
others that they hardly bothered to be explicit about it. The same in The Howard Years. Perhaps it was
not my memory but my perception that was unreliable. Perhaps I didn’t get it. Maybe I resented this.
In one of these matters my own memory did not matter much: there was always the video of
the handshake. Actual footage is empirical history par excellence. To check my observation I could
watch it again and again. And I did and I have since. Even so I have not really been able see the
problem, or see the aggression, if aggression is the problem. I can read aggression into it but I can’t
know it’s there. Maybe this proves my perception of humans and their motives is unreliable. When
observing human action, especially social interaction, faulty perception of intentions amounts to
naïveté, credulity, poor character judgement, lack of empathy, social ineptitude. Maybe there is an
ethical argument for keeping an open mind, but in politics epistemological scruples equal gullibility.
Just over 53 minutes into episode 3 of The Howard Years 5 we see Howard and some of the
media entourage, cameras in hand, posing for a photo outside the studio. A shot to commemorate their
time together on the campaign trail. We see Tony Eastley inside the studio interviewing Latham for, I
assume, that morning’s ABC radio’s A.M. 6 Meanwhile Fran Kelly’s voiceover tells us that ‘by
election eve the Coalition was confident of victory and now Mark Latham was doing everything to
help’. Then we see the handshake. Howard tells us what he thinks about Latham’s handshaking form,
and we are shown Howard’s and Latham’s mostly obscured handshake at the leaders’ debate, and then
in Howard’s words ‘right on cue’ we are shown the iconic handshake again. This time with a cut
halfway through the handshake to a longer shot from another camera: the judgement of history shot.
In the footage Latham comes out of the studio, Studio 211, and leans a long way forward to
take Howard’s hand, he takes it firmly, and pulls himself up close to Howard. He unbalances Howard
and jerks the Prime Minister towards him, almost off his feet. Maybe it was just all too physical for
some viewers, more like Rugby League than politics. Watching it all again some months after writing
the first sentence of this paragraph, I managed to notice how close Latham’s face gets to Howard’s and
how much bigger Latham is, leaning towards and over Howard. I could have described this as ‘in your
face’ and ‘stand over’ but not in honesty. The whole thing looks clumsy. Latham is too boisterous. For
a man ‘who knew it was coming’, Howard looks physically unprepared. Latham’s grin is forced. So is
Howard’s. The handshake was always going to be awkward, between enemies constrained by rules
demanding cordiality. It lasts long enough to raise the questions ‘how long should this handshake last’
and ‘how do they end it’. In a handshake there must be, at some level, cooperation, but even people of
good will can’t always manage the synchronised choreography of a felicitous handshake. There are
words of greeting between the two, some sound slurred as if the nerves of the moment take over.
Howard looks as though he’s ready to be released from Latham’s grip; he solicits an end by saying
‘OK?’ and they release one another. As Latham turns to go Howard pats him on the back and enters
the studio. That’s all. I still can’t see that handshake for what others say it was. Of course it doesn’t
take much imagination to impute hostile intent — mutual — but it doesn’t take much imagination
either to impute hostility veiled in boisterous cordiality and not expressed in physical violence.
However, Liberal insiders, the media, perhaps ALP minders and perhaps a lot of the viewers that
evening saw aggression. Friends I ask about it seem to have seen the handshake as aggressive, but
even then I can’t believe that my perception would have been all that unusual among casual voters that
Friday evening before the election. I was probably having a beer, talking, cooking tea and watching
the ‘election eve’ news.

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 So I’ve been wondering: what did happen outside the ABC studio that morning, what media
event 7 took place that election eve, what is the truth claim of the shot in The Howard Years, what did
that event become.
The clip has the disadvantage of not being quotable here, in print. All I can do is translate the
shot into descriptions, but what a shot shows and what a description of it says are never the same. 8
That’s a problem. I have already written descriptions of several acts taking place within the manifold
event of the shot. Some of what I’ve written refers to the same act but under different descriptions by
different people. Sometimes these different descriptions are inconsistent or contradictory, in which
case the identity of the act is ambiguous: we saw the same act but we are not talking about the same
act. Several different acts have been identified in the same event-space, where only one act at most
could have occurred.
Howard offers his version in The Howard Years. He describes his own shrewd political
performance, letting Latham exhibit a ‘very silly’ handshake. Howard supports the story of his
cunning with a slightly inaccurate description of the handshake at the leaders’ debate, when Latham
‘did the same thing’. The debate handshake did not happen quite as Howard says when ‘the cameras
weren’t on us’. A viewer can see the men shaking hands but the initial clinch is obscured by someone 9
passing in the foreground. Any silliness at this stage would not be visible. But as the passer-by moves
and the camera zooms in some of the shake and the release become visible, although still partly
obscured by Howard’s back and arm. What I notice about that handshake is Latham’s nervous,
mispronounced answer to Howard’s ‘good to see you’. He says ‘yay’ rather than ‘yeah’. The same
tongue twisting nerves he suffers in the later studio door shake. Maybe he was forewarned; besides
Latham and Eastley the radio studio was full of people to tell him Howard was outside, but Howard
was standing right up close to the door and I reckon 10 this took Latham by surprise. Beyond
clumsiness, any silliness on Latham’s part was strictly off the cuff.
We can read Latham’s version. The event was revisited in the media during the election wash
up; it looks like it took three weeks to bubble back to the surface. Brian Loughnane, the Liberal
campaign manager, spoke to the National Press Club on the 27th October 2004. Maybe this was when
the media registered that the event and its interpretation had become a media event. I don’t know.
There is an article in The Age online for 27th in which Latham responds to criticism of his handshake
with his own critique of Howard’s ‘armshake flapping style’. Writing in The Daily Telegraph on the
28th, Malcolm Farr said ‘to many, Mr Latham was menacingly shirt-fronting the much smaller Mr
Howard’. Farr himself says ‘it wasn’t a pleasant scene’ and he reported that Loughnane had told the
Press Club that the Liberals ‘received more feedback about it than any other campaign incident’. This
media coverage must have stimulated a note in Latham’s diary. The published entry for 29th October
reads:

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw footage of my handshake with Howard the day before
polling day. What are they going on about in the media? It’s a Tory gee-up: we got close to each other,
sure, but otherwise it was a regulation man’s handshake. It’s silly to say it cost us votes—my numbers
spiked in the last night of polling.
The full story: Howard deserved a lot more than a firm handshake. Throughout the campaign,
every time I saw him he kept on trying to give me a bone-crusher, squeezing tight and shaking with his
arm, instead of his wrist, like a flapping motion. It’s a small man’s thing, trying to show you can match
the big guy at something. I wasn’t too worried about it, thought it was funny, until the last Sunday of
the campaign at the St George Leagues Club lunch, when Howard did the same thing to Janine. She
said to me, ‘that man just tried to break my hand. It really hurt’.
Enough was enough. Next time I saw him, at the ABC radio studio in Sydney, I put on the
squeeze and got a bit closer to him, so he couldn’t do the flapping thing. The weak animal looked
startled, so it had the desired effect. It’s ironic however: I’m supposed to be the intimidating one in
politics, but I have never tried to break a woman’s hand. How does Howard get away with it? 11

That ‘enough was enough’ implies some unyielding intent. Probably hostile, possibly not.
Latham insists his was ‘a regulation man’s handshake’ — at the time that’s what it looked like to me, a
limp-wristed sufferer of many a regulation handshake — but a handshake spiked with ill intent is not
quite regulation. Just what Latham did depends on whether we read his words or his handshake
charitably, and that might depend on whether we want to look knowing rather than naive.

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 There is some empirical handshake science that needs to be explored here too. Physiology,
anthropology, sociology. Maybe ethics too. Just how painful was that handshake. Was it a ‘bone-
crusher’? Was it an anti arm-flapper? What is the etiquette of hearty, jovial bone crushers in general?
Is their latent aggression in this man-thing or this ‘small man’s thing’ as Latham calls it? Or is it
blatant? Are women in particular, as Howard implies, likely to be offended by this? When does
strength become violence? How much hostile attitude, pain-causing intent and physical vigour turn a
handshake into a violent action? How should men and women, wrestlers and pianists, politicians and
footballers, shake hands with one another? And what is ‘shirt-fronting’? how aggressive is it? and did
Latham do it? Latham at least goes so far as to offer some observations on handshaking style and
etiquette, including on how men should shake hands with women, but I’m not sure about his
distinctions. He identifies two faults with Howard’s handshake: an ethical one about hand-breaking
instead of firm gripping; and a stylistic or aesthetic one about arm-flapping instead of shaking with the
wrist. It’s all only off-the-cuff, folk handshaking theory, and maybe it’s just bad faith rationalising
itself after the fact. (But hell, who in this whole affair was free of bad faith?) To my mind the shaking-
with-the-wrist theory only raises more questions, physiological to start with. Try it! The topic is too
big. It’s a whole other essay. A PhD.

I said I lived through these times. But what did I live through. What events did I really
experience of the election? Mostly stuff on TV, radio, in the papers and on-line. I guess I was ‘out
there in the electorate’. I was where the politicians were saying they were or wanted to be, listening to
people, in touch with them. We were all living through the times authentically ‘out there in the
electorate’ in our own ways. Out here out there was and is a big place though.
So I say I saw the handshake, when what I saw was the news footage of the handshake. It was
not just actual footage, but footage of the day — almost live — and it was footage shot and broadcast
as an event itself. The record of the handshake is not the handshake itself. When identifying or
differentiating events one distinction seems too trivial to mention: that between an event and the
record of the event. However, there is an awful lot of hazy historical thinking that blurs this
distinction, because the distinction is not at all as simple as it might seem. There is a special class
actions in which the action and its description are the same event. When someone says ‘I apologise’ or
‘I promise’ or ‘I declare’ — as politicians often do — just such an event takes place. 12 But speech is a
very short-lived record. When the apology or promise or declaration is written and signed, or videoed,
the event and its record are one. The same when a handshake is performed for the camera. Howard and
Latham were in election mode when every action is performed for the cameras, even the inadvertent
ones. For the politicians, the media and the viewers, the recorded handshake endures as a performance
for the cameras and by all the players. Though so familiar to us, actions performed by making records
of themselves have an uncanny effect. All of us out there in the electorate were like there outside the
ABC studio, watching the event take place; and Latham and Howard and the media were like out there
in the electorate, although not quite listening to voters, just performing to them. As we see in the case
of the staged media event, such actions have the power to fascinate and even delude, yet long ago the
same class of actions also had the power to make historical consciousness possible in the first place.
But that’s another story. 13
With the footage these players collectively do something by showing something. However,
unlike a linguistic event that records itself, the meaning of a film or video is not explicit. How strange,
that a video epitomises truth by correspondence to the facts, yet is not explicit because it is
indeterminate in just exactly what it shows. It’s not logically explicit. It doesn’t say what the event is;
we have to interpret this if we want a logically explicit meaning. 14 And apart from the problem of
determining the explicit identity of actions from footage, actions, if we are to understand them
according to their intentions, are notoriously ambiguous right from the first moment of their
performance. All at once the handshake can show and be mutually intended to show a kind of polite
cordiality on the parts of Latham and Howard towards one another, while for one another, if we take
each at his word, it is a lesson in handshaking rectitude: a disciplinary lesson according to Latham, a
lesson in courtesy according to Howard. Beyond that, on Howard’s part, if we can take him at his
word, it was a political lesson. Howard’s ‘courteous’ handshake had a tricky intention up its sleeve: to
reveal any silly and offensive handshaking propensities on Latham’s part.

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 To throw light on the murky world of intentions I will try the terms and analysis used by the
philosopher Paul Grice when describing the meaning of spoken acts 15 : Howard intended that viewers
recognise that, while he intended that viewers recognise that he intended that viewers recognise that by
shaking hands with Latham he (Howard) was sincerely shaking hands with Latham as a sign of his
good will towards Latham, viewers recognise that, while Latham intended that viewers recognise that
he intended that viewers recognise that by shaking hands with Howard he (Latham) was sincerely
shaking hands with Howard as a sign of his (Latham’s) good will towards Howard, viewers would not
recognise that Latham intended that viewers not recognise that he was not sincerely shaking hands and
was indeed ‘putting the crush’ on Howard as a sign (to Howard alone) of what Howard took to be his
(Latham’s) ill will towards him. That is only one account of Howard’s intentions. It may well be
wrong — who knows — but one is quite enough.
While this is excruciatingly convoluted I think we are quite given to this kind of ‘nesting’ of
intentions 16 . In a rough and ready way we do it as part and parcel of human communication. We just
don’t articulate all the intentions to ourselves at the time, nor get them neatly ordered. It’s
unconscious, so we don’t always get what we are doing, and since we have seldom formulated our
intentions to ourselves in the first place, we are magnificently capable of re-interpreting our actions
later on. There is no horse’s mouth. We act, we have the experience of acting, but we don’t have the
experience of the act’s intention. Later on we recall our waking life as we do our dreams, and practise
something like what Freud called the ‘secondary elaboration’ that a dreamer performs when recalling a
dream. We do a rewrite on intentions.
Even then, for all of Howard’s or Latham’s handshaking intentions, it is what happened after
their handshake that defined what kind of action the handshake was. And then, the fact of the
handshake was not just defined by its effects, because the fact of the handshake-event was more than
just a discrete handshake right from the start. It is normal for an event can become inconceivable
except as an episode in a narrative, in which case shaking hands can also be performing to the
cameras, teaching a lesson, suppressing an arm-flap, taking revenge, trapping an opponent, forcing
conviviality, being courteous, recovering from a surprise encounter, trying to win an election, who
knows. Just because its not unintelligible doesn’t means it’s decipherable. The event became a battle
of the narratives.

When I saw the handshake on election eve, the shot was claustrophobic. I wonder if it was the
long shot used in the Howard Years for the handshake’s second showing. I don’t know but I doubt it. I
would have said it was shot close up in a narrow corridor. It wasn’t in a narrow corridor but that’s my
retrospective elaboration of my scarcely remembered initial impression. Anyway, that handshake
started out confined to a little bit of time and space outside an ABC studio door, an event-space just
big enough to be occupied by two crowded men shaking hands. But in its causal framework it has
become bigger and more complicated. Right from the start, it was a little more complicated than the
actual clip shows. The handshakers were crowded by media: cameras and journalists. So right from
the start the real action was not just the handshakers’ handshake but the media handshake with the
journalists as players as well. They made the television and on-line documents; they made the news
and the documentary. Journalists quite often say they just report the news, a claim that is either dumb
or disingenuous. They are the historians of the day, and it is as historians that they are players. What
we denote by the quasi singular plural, the media, as foggy in its reference as the fog of its effects and
intentions, is not a transparent and it does not simply mediate history. The media are part of it and they
make it: the media event.
The handshake media event misled in the manner that actions like declarations and promises
often do: rather than saying it was not true, I would say it was not felicitous. 17 On the part of the two
handshakers, if it was infelicitous it was because it was insincere. On the part of the media, those
historians of the present, the shot was not untrue, for the deed can be seen on screen. It was infelicitous
because the media failed to acknowledge that they were performers too and that the event was not just
on screen. It was infelicitous from the start, and continued to be because of the disinclination on the
part of any of the players to identify their deeds unambiguously and see that identity through. There
was bad faith all round. All social actions and especially media events risk infelicity, because of the
likely lack of agreement in the players’ intentions, and the handshake event was a battle of intentions
from the start. In due course it exceeded the overt intentions of the players anyway, and there was a

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lack of capacity to make good any but certain cunning, seldom-specified intentions. These intentions,
which I turn to below, motivate certain reports of events and end up driving media events like this one.
Meanwhile the shot, as actual footage, stands as a dazzling beacon of video’s frankness, blinding us to
the shenanigans of intentions. True or false, felicitous or not, bad faith or not, for Howard and the
media, if not for Latham, the shot has so far worked. The action exceeded the time and place; what it
was on election eve was not what it was by the time of The Howard Years. In the battle of narratives,
Howard and the media are still succeeding in telling the tale, and in making Mark Latham play the
lone wolf.

Causes and effects are what interest us most about events. We think of acts as being caused by
their intentions or reasons, and an act’s intention is often described in terms of its intended end or its
effect. This inclination to describe events by their effects is so familiar that we have to pause to see the
irony of saying that Hamlet lived to avenge his own murder. Yet while we describe acts by their
intentions as to ends, their ends need not have been realised and the intentions may have been hidden,
ambiguous or ambivalent even to the agents. The intentions of an act can be reformulated over time
and the effects can change over time. With either the identity of the act changes. Cause precedes
effect, but events unfold with a retroactive force. A past act can take on a new identity depending on
its consequences. In general, deeds exceed the intentions of the doers. Whatever their claims to
authentic reporting — to what actually happened and how it happened — the handshake is now well
out of Latham’s and even Howard’s hands.
Let’s indulge in a little ‘what if’ history, hypothetical history. Let’s say the handshake had
happened a week out from polling day. I reckon Howard’s spin-doctors would have been playing
Latham’s handshake for a gaffe. They would have had time to. Once the handshake had been spun as a
gaffe the media would have been questioning Latham about ‘his gaffe’. Commentators would have
been analysing the significance of the gaffe for Labor’s election chances. They would have been
saying it would not help. Voters would have been headshaking about Latham, or if they weren’t they
would have been told that voters were, and most would have believed voters were. So even those who
hadn’t been headshaking, and knew they needn’t, would have had to start headshaking eventually,
because with so much knowing headshaking apparently going on the handshake would no longer have
been the handshake it had been for them initially. By its effects and therefore in it’s identity, it would
have become an emblematic event: it would have been a gaffe. Something like this is did happen, so
Grahame Morris and Brian Loughnane declared, before the election and effecting the result. ‘I think
the handshake was one of those things that encapsulated the doubts they [voters] had about him’
Loughnane said to the National Press Club, ‘I think it was one of those insights which occur that say
something fundamental about the individual.’ 18 But if it did happen, most of it happened after the
election. As an emblem 19 the footage of Latham’s act could stand for the state of his character, and
once the footage became the event and doing became being, time could be transcended by
interpretations. The handshake scarcely had time to affect the result of the election, but it had time to
affect the story of the election. The story changed the events themselves — something that happens all
the time in history. To repeat Fran Kelly’s judgment of history voiceover four years later in The
Howard Years: ‘by election eve the Coalition was confident of victory and now Mark Latham was
doing everything to help’.
A gaffe, a particular kind of political mistake, is just one instance of a peculiar self-generating
character that can take over the description and thereby the identity of social events, especially media
events, especially political events. 20 History is a sea of actions including communicative actions and
communicative actions about actions and therefore it is a sea of interpretations. We can hardly just
take the word of any of the players in an event, but sometimes some descriptions are cunningly used
and manage to take off. They gather authority by gaining currency, and they can gain currency by
being no more than trivially newsworthy. Even a rumour reported as a rumour is out there once
reported. The concept of spin recognises this: if you are in a good position, you can stir the events into
a little eddy of interpretation so that your interpretation picks up momentum and becomes a whirlpool
which sucks in all other descriptions of the events. That’s what Latham meant when he called it ‘a
Tory gee-up’.
To say that there is no such thing as objectivity in history is completely to misunderstand
history and objectivity. For history consists, objectively, of interpretations. That’s the point. For the

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most part the discipline of history reports events and what it interprets in order to produce its reports
are other reports of events. Documents chasing each other’s tails. The system is not completely closed
— catastrophe always threatens and often prevails — but for the most part objectivity outside of the
documents is registered as part fascinating, part irritating stimulus. Objectively, the handshake-event is
now the swell of consequences and its interpretations. Take what Judith Brett wrote immediately after
Howard’s election loss in 2007 when she described why Latham lost in 2004:

As we got closer to the [2004] election, [Latham’s early] support fell away and Latham’s personal flaws
started to become more apparent: his pleasure in the politics of envy and the barely concealed
aggression he displayed in a bone-crushing handshake with Howard in full view of the cameras. 21

The ‘politics of envy’ and ‘barely concealed aggression’? Is this still the old ‘Tory gee-up’ or is it the
judgement of history? Meanings are forces of nature and brute facts of history, and at present I would
say the brute facts here are best represented by the likes of Brett and The Howard Years. The
documentary plays the handshake footage twice. Through the eye of History — the second take — we
see why Latham lost and, in all its videoed veracity, the unquestionability of why he lost.
The answer to Latham’s question ‘How does Howard get away with it?’ is that Howard won
the election. In effect, despite losing the 2007 election, he still rules. Even if Howard doesn’t have sole
rights on telling this history, ‘history’ — in this case something like 51% of the voters and the media
mostly — has put him in the position to govern in spirit and write the judgement of history. He and his
supporters are in the position to spin the judgement. Latham’s actions since the 2004 election have not
helped to get his take on events accepted. Discrete acts, done once and for all, if there are such things,
are the exception. Almost any act might be better undertaken on the understanding that its full
enactment may depend on its being seen through to its end, and even then, the end of such an action is
a state that must be maintained. And the story of the action must be maintained too. When Latham
took his leave of politics and, in response to a tide of condescension and criticism, flouted political
decorum with the criticisms he published in his diaries, he gave others the motive and opportunity to
ostracise him. And, whether by intention or not, he ostracised himself. In a battle of interpretations an
historical player has to stay on the field. You have to keep playing to affect the identity of an event,
especially when the event is an interpretation. Otherwise, unless you are committing to the long game,
you lose the privilege of making history. It’s a bit like putting your hand over the lens of the news
camera, a hopeless gesture under any eye except maybe Eternity’s, when (you can hope) all actions
might be redeemed.

Don Watson doesn’t know ‘how modern political history can be written by anyone who has
not actually lived inside the organism’. 22 But you get the weird impression that that’s precisely
because it is the job of those insiders to be writing history into existence — to script it, to perform it
and to describe it. As they say it’s all about the narrative. It’s their narrative, not so much theirs as
individuals but as voices of a system of interpretations in a system of actions that are interpretations,
commentary on commentary on commentary that swirls and self-stabilises into well known narrative
forms. Of so many of the episodes and events you can’t help thinking that the insiders must know they
are set ups. Yet most insiders, as Joan Didion wrote ‘believe that only an outsider, only someone too
“naïve” to know the rules of the game’ would so describe them. ‘The narrative is made up of many
understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of
obtaining the dramatic story line.’ 23 What counts as dramatic is probably the first of these
‘understandings’, where ‘dramatic’ equals ‘newsworthy’ and comedy, farce, satire, romance and
ridicule are all among the genres. And the understandings are not just between individuals so much as
adaptations of individuals to well known narratives in which among the events of most
newsworthiness we find gaffes, backflips, straying off message, poll reversals, leaks, rumours, major
embarrassments; slow burns. The work of the insiders — politicians, staffers, media — is not to
change the world but interpret it, but in an uncanny and regressive substantiation of Marx’s thesis 24
they steer and change it by interpreting it.
History is a science and journalists are the historians of contemporary politics, the experts in
their field. As practical experts, journalists pursue the professional role of managing the production of
the historical narratives of contemporary politics — the news cycle. They manage contemporary

7
political history in the two senses that, by no accident 25 , inhere in the word ‘history’: ‘history’
meaning the reporting of events and ‘history’ meaning the events themselves. The most conspicuous
tasks of such management include specifying the proper ends of politics, or what counts as success,
the interpretation of political events and, what often amounts to the same thing, the prediction of the
consequences of such events. They often exhibit their expert understanding in displays of predictive
nous, typically performed by commenting on the latest opinion poles. Such displays win prestige, most
importantly in the eyes of colleagues. And like all modern systems of managerial expertise the
organisation of the production of the media tends to exhibit the strategies of bureaucracy, no matter
how much this is disguised by the institutions of private capital, individuality and celebrity, and by the
sheer talent of a good journalist.
Since one of the main professional concerns in interpreting events is to avoid looking naïve, a
typical interpretation is hedged by reporting other interpretations, speculations and rumours, and
commenting on those, on the effects of those, and on the effects of the effects of those. Thus the media
players, as bureaucrats of the political news cycle, have what I called above ‘cunning, seldom-
specified intentions’ and they can succeed in carrying them through. They intend to look knowing, and
to report and interpret events in terms that allow them to look knowing, even if in doing so they ignore
certain virtues of good historiography for the sake instead of the functional subjectivity of role-players
in a media system that repays them with professional prestige. The media’s system of interpretations is
steered by such imperatives towards well-known narratives and a common vocabulary, both of which
are very well adapted to the commentary environment. For example, to report that an event has been
interpreted as a gaffe adds yet another interpretation of the event as a gaffe to the system, reinforcing
the narrative. Where interpretation of an event consists, as it so often does, in predicting its
consequences, reporting an event as a gaffe predicts and scripts and fulfils the prediction all at once.
There is a whole dazzling sociological spectacle going on. On the inside this organism, with the self-
absorption typical of a bureaucracy, self-absorption to the point idiocy, has its own weird empirical
perspective; from outside there is no unobscured seeing in.
In referring to ‘cunning, seldom specified intentions’ I should caution that I think these
intentions are mostly unconscious. Only when seen from the viewpoint of the media system as a whole
do they function as the ‘intentions’ and then they are strictly steering principles of the system rather
than intentions of the players, a bit like Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. Witness how almost to a man
or woman the media contend that they are ‘just reporting the news’. An honest enough claim. But for
the system as a whole such honesty can work as a kind of systemic self-deception, not letting the right
hand see what the left is doing. Journalists want to get things right, but if they want to reduce the risk
of looking incompetent, that creates pressures in favour of the selection of certain events and certain
stories which make it more likely that they will get things right. So although ‘just reporting the news’,
it turns out that almost nothing fed into this organism comes out just as it goes in. Any truth fed in,
becomes fodder for another narrative, and comes out, at best, as another truth. This would follow just
from the ubiquity of interpretation in historiography, but interpretation has its own peculiar
characteristics in the news cycle of modern media. Incidentally, if the term ‘bureaucratic’ sounds
disparaging, then what is fascinating about popular sociology is that the name for such an everyday
role should have been transformed into an insult. For, one way or another, every second person is a
bureaucrat now. Any disparaging connotations register the disquiet people have that their individuality
is at once constituted by and compromised by the impersonal and arbitrary forces of bureaucracy.

A little more, a little different, hypothetical history. What if Latham had won the 2004
election? It’s easy to make the doubter’s rejoinder: that this is a mere hypothetical, and that he could
not have, and he just wouldn’t have. It is especially easy because he just didn’t. In reply I could try to
remind objectors that the difference between victory and loss in the 2004 (and usually in any election)
was only a few percentage points: Judith Brett says 47.2% of the 2004 vote went to Labor. But in their
turn objectors could as easily say that not only did Latham, in fact, lose the election, anyone could see
why he could not have won it (particularly those who understood the handshake). This kind of dispute
would get me nowhere, but it’s beside the point. I am not interested in whether Latham should have or
even could have won the 2004 election. I am interested in what would have happened if Latham had

8
not lost it. Logically, this is quite different from indulging in should haves and wishful thinking. It’s
not wishful thinking to ask ‘What if the Nazi’s had not lost WWII?’
Such a hypothetical is a case of the distinctive logic of what we call subjunctive conditionals
(to use the grammatical jargon), or counterfactual conditionals (to use the philosophical). It is a logic
familiar to everyone as part of everyday talk. The particular counterfactual that interests me is this: If
Latham had not lost the election, then the handshake would not have been a gaffe. Is this true or false?
Philosophy has had something to say on this. What sets this kind of conditional apart is that it ‘can be
seriously entertained and affirmed or denied in full cognisance of the falsity of the antecedent’ 26 :
Latham did lose the election, but what if he hadn’t? David Lewis proposed that we can explain what
we mean by one thing causing another just in terms of such a counterfactual. David Hume had already
said much the same thing 200 years ago. 27 Lewis’s proposal goes like this: let’s grant that Latham lost
the election (which he did) and the handshake was a gaffe (which many claim to be the case). Now
consider the following claim: if Latham had not lost the election then the handshake would not have
been a gaffe. If such a claim is true then Latham’s losing the election caused the handshake to become
a gaffe. With the counterfactual part of Lewis’s formulation (in italics) we assume that Latham did not
lose the election and then see how convincing we find the assertion of its consequence. This is
something the historical sciences like climatology and ecology do all the time; they run a model. So
when we run the model in which Latham won the election we might find for example that we come to
interpret his handshake as aggressive but in a winner’s way, or as a sign of confidence and command;
and Howard might even be looking like Latham’s startled, ‘weak animal’ about to be defeated. Or
maybe no one in the model would look twice at the handshake except a few churlish Liberals, and few
would interpret it as aggressive at all. Or maybe the handshake might not turn out to be a gaffe but it
might in the longer run turn out to be an ominous sign of aggression and petulance that the electorate
ignored at its peril. One way or another the narrative by which the act is eventually identified as a
gaffe or not would be different. It might look as though I am claiming that a cause can happen after its
effect, but the narrative only causes the description of the event, for we describe events in terms of
their consequences. Of course hypotheticals can get us into disputed territory as a famous example of
the philosophers shows 28 : ‘If Caesar had been in command in Korea, he would have used the atom
bomb’ vs. ‘If Caesar had been in command in Korea, he would have used catapults’. The truth of a
counterfactual depends on the context. But what context? Whose narrative decides the context? Who
sets the parameters of the model?
Lewis came up with a famous or infamous philosophical way of dealing with this. 29 The
Latham counterfactual is true if, and only if, some possible world where Latham wins the election and
the handshake was not a gaffe is more similar to the actual world than any possible world in which
Latham wins the election and the handshake was a gaffe. Possible worlds? the actual world? degrees
of similarity between them? Compared to the facts of history this can sound like angels-on-a-pin stuff.
Counterfactual history can look like a kind of intellectual parlour game, or workshop activity. If it is
though, then so is the attribution of historical causes; so it’s an angels-on-a-pin parlour game that
everyone is playing. David Hume was sceptical about how we can really know that A causes B, even
when we can at least know that events of A’s kind are regularly followed by events of B’s kind. The
events that intrigue historical inquiry are notable for reminding us that any event is unique. So the
events of interest may scarcely seem to be of a kind. Since a unique event A can only be followed
once by its unique consequence B, uniqueness denies us the opportunity to observe regular succession,
so our causal inferences have to fall back on our counterfactual nous.
The counterfactual account of causation isn’t the only contender but it is as strong a contender
as any for illustrating how we ordinarily use our concept of causation. Stipulating how we should use
the concept of causation or whether there is even such a thing are other questions. Putting things in the
terms of counterfactual logic is just making our reasoning (or sophistry) explicit. So when people
claim that someone’s intentions cause a particular action they expect to be able to entertain a
counterfactual hypothetical about the intention which will establish whether the intention was causally
effective or just background attitude. Just to illustrate by putting the violent handshake interpretation
to the test: if someone claims that Latham’s intention to bully Howard caused a violent handshake,
they are asserting three things: that Latham’s intention was to bully; that the shake was violent; and
that if Latham had not intended to bully Howard the shake would not have been violent. The crucial
claim is the second one: that the handshake was violent. We have to judge its truth, as I tried, from the

9
footage. It turns out though that the footage is the best evidence we have for the first claim too — the
claim about Latham’s intention. The quality of the footage as evidence is rivalled by Latham’s
testimony, but interpreting intentions from first person testimony is not a royal road to truth. Neither
the footage nor the testimony disambiguates the handshake. The third claim – the counterfactual
conditional — relies on too much question begging to tell us anything much about what happened. By
the way, I don’t think I have read or heard anyone actually claim that Latham’s intention to bully
Howard caused a violent handshake. Nothing so specific. A way to hedge bets.
Meanwhile, when or if people see the cause of Latham’s election loss as his aggression or
petulance, or his irresponsibility, or his ‘shoot from the hip approach’ (Howard’s words), or his
readiness to ‘blow up’, or his ‘politics of envy’ or even his handshake outside the studio, they are
running one or another counterfactual model of possible worlds and finding some possible world that
they think is most similar to the actual world. Who knows? It might be true that if Latham had not had
one or all of these flaws or if he had not shaken Howard’s hand the way he did, then he would have
won the election.
After John Howard lost the 2007 election a lot of people seemed to know why. (They would
also know why Julia Gillard almost lost the 2010 election too). Like Judith Brett they had seen it
coming. Brett 30 furnishes us with several reasons. 1: Howard’s age (68) was his ‘Achilles heel’. It
meant he was either ‘past it’ or ‘out of ideas’ or he’d gotten ‘tired’ or he was ‘disconnected’ from
younger generations. 2: People had already wanted an alternative to Howard in 2004 but Latham had
been ‘unelectable’. 3: ‘Many Australians of ethnic background distrusted his backward looking,
British-centric version of Australian nationalism’. 4: There was ‘a rising vote for Labor in blue-ribbon
middle-class Liberal seats’.
In The Howard Years Tony Abbott got eschatological: ‘All good things come to an end.’
Others offered: ‘People had moved on.’ Howard was left behind on climate change policy. The
industrial relations policy, Work Choices, was ‘a bridge too far’. If Howard had not tried to take
advantage of his Senate majority by pushing Work Choices through, he would not have alienated
enough voters to lose the election. We run counterfactuals as second nature. We could run
counterfactuals for all of these casual explanations. ‘Howard stayed too long.’ If Howard had gone,
Costello would have won. True or false? In the long run though, did ‘Howard’ even lose?
‘After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiry into their
causes. When he knows what happened he already knows why it happened’. R.G. Collingwood wrote
that in The Idea of History. 31 It’s a big, beautiful claim — and sure, we identify acts by their causes or
intentions — but it’s too perfect. It takes the history out of history. When asked about the effect of the
French Revolution Zhou Enlai is said to have said it was too soon to tell. Political commentators, as
historians of contemporary events, claim to understand events as they happen, a somewhat deluded
claim if in order to understand the events they have to understand their effects before they happen.
Their commentary is peppered with implied claims to prophetic power or at best to predictive nous. If
all goes well for them, if they demonstrate that they know the narrative and don’t seem naive, their
claims enter into the course of history as causes, and the events-cum-effects they claim to understand
before they have happened happen, because what happens is primarily an interpretation and brute
interpretation becomes brute fact. Actually this has its counterpart in what professional historians do—
those historians that is of less recent events — although they tend to share a slightly different albeit
related delusion: if a little hindsight is good, more hindsight is better. But time does not put things in
perspective. History does not become definitive, it ripens and ages. And it just piles up new
interpretations as the old ones of memory and record rot away. Don Watson was right: ‘In our
different ways we all bring our little bit of ignorance and add it to the pile.’ This predicament defines
the historian’s freedom and therefore the historian’s responsibility. It also circumscribes the historian’s
ambition. Either way history is written in history and there is no waiting until after the historian has
ascertained the facts.
Ah for that now lost Friday night out there in the electorate in 2004, when, TV on, beer in
hand and garlic chopped, I saw Mark Latham lurch through that door, take John Howard’s hand and
shake him off his feet. It makes you wonder, what’s actually happening when history’s happening?

10
1
John Howard was Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, which, along with the National Party in what
is known as The Coalition, where the incumbent government. Mark Latham was leader of the opposition Labor
Party.
2
The line is from the preface to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977, 13. Much quoted and worth quoting:

Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are
remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten. …I am seeking
to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’
artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of
posterity. … They lived through these times…

And he does, not just from the condescension but the relegation, the forgetfulness, and the ignorance.
3
Strictly all historical claims are mediated by memory, for longer or shorter times, with or without the
mnemonic aid of written or filmed records.
4
Just what is a gaffe? It arises from the peculiar feedback of act and interpretation, feedback to which electoral
politics is particularly prone. See What Survives of the Past
5
http://www.abc.net.au/news/howardyears/
6
Tony Eastley? AM? Nothing in The Howard Years is explicit about this. As a viewer you have to be able to
identify these things yourself, otherwise you’ll never know. Such is the nature of actual footage and
historiography. How much does it matter? See History, The Movie.
7
Throughout I use the term ‘event’. We would probably talk about the ‘act’ of shaking hands, especially if we
confine the act to what one person does with another. It is, up to a point, a cooperative act; two people act
together. So far the term ‘act’ applies. Once the act grows beyond the agency of the two handshakers and
especially when the news media and the electorate become players our linguistic usage acknowledges that what
is happening is beyond the intentions of personal agency and we revert to the more general term ‘event’.
8
See History, The Movie.
9
A tallish man with grey hair and glasses. Someone would know this man. The image alone can’t name him.
10
I reckon we need this word, not just in colloquial English but in philosophy. It implies giving due thought to
something. More than I think, I reckon affirms that one has worked on the question, thus giving it a more
confident force of assertion. Unlike its closest synonyms I judge or I consider though, it implies a more intimate
kind of frankness about the epistemological limitations of the speaker, while still meaning much more than mere
calculation of an economic or unreflective kind. If it has a drawback it is that this intimacy can be false or used
to sweeten misleading claims.
11
Mark Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005, 369
12
In the 1950s the philosopher J.L. Austin described such actions as performative, most notably in How To Do
Things With Words. See Kicking Stones, And Other Acts, Processes and Events and Writing for more detail on
such events.
13
Told in Kicking Stones, And Other Acts, Processes and Events and Writing
14
See History, The Movie
15
See for example Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1989 for an account of Grice’s theory of meanings and intentions.
16
Grice’s term, 283. The excruciation comes from the inadequacy of words for charting the embedded clauses.
Grammar can do it but we lose track. Although a written sentence is a kind of wordy diagram, a more schematic

11
diagram like a flow chart is better. It is curious that the way we communicate intentions is so inadequate. It
suggests the evolutionary explanation that clear communication of our self-understanding is of little advantage or
perhaps disadvantageous. Something similar happens with our communication of time and space relations.
Language by means of tense is brilliant at mapping temporal relations between speakers, others and events. But
time is one-dimensional. Language struggles to map spatial relations beyond linear ones. For two or three
dimensions a diagram such as a map or model is much better.
17
To borrow a term from J.L. Austin’s theory of performatives.
18
Quoted by Malcolm Farr in his Daily Telegraph article of 28 October 2004. I should say that I came across
Farr’s article on a web page (http://www.theyfly.com/gaia/latham.howard.04.htm) and have not checked it in the
Telegraph archives. The web page in question claimed to expose Howard’s handshake as that of a freemason and
claimed the media were in on the freemason conspiracy. I did not take the time to check whether this was a joke.
I assume it wasn’t. I offer it only as one more interpretation. As Don Watson said ‘In our different ways we all
bring a little bit of ignorance of history and add it to the pile.’ (‘Garibaldi in an Armani Suit’, 67, in Best
Australian Essays, 2000, ed. Peter Craven, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2000)
19
When images are shown repeatedly they become emblems or icons, that is they come to stand for something
that is not necessarily the particular thing they show. The clip of the handshake rather than showing a handshake
started to show ‘something fundamental’ about Latham; it ‘encapsulated the doubts’ voters had about Latham.
The image, which transparently showed an action, became a symbol, and opaquely portended other things.
20
Gaffes, spin,… media events come in various forms. This is what David Foster Wallace had to say in his essay
‘Host’ about talkback radio:

One clear way that talk radio and conservative cable do affect politics: repetition. Which they’re really,
really good at. If a story or allegation or factoid gets sufficiently hammered on in conservative media,
over and over again and day after day, it is almost inevitable that the mainstream press will pick it up, if
only because it eventually becomes real news that the conservative media is making such heavy weather
of this item. In many cases the ‘Conservative commentators are charging that…’ drops off the item (if
only because it’s unsexy jot-and-tittle clutter compared to the charge itself) and the story takes on a life
of its own. (In Consider The Lobster and Other Essays, 287)
21
Judith Brett, Quarterly Essay 28. 2007, ‘Exit Right’, 3
22
Don Watson, in ‘Garibaldi in an Armani Suit’, 67-88, 76.
23
Joan Didion, ‘Insider Baseball’ in After Henry, Vintage, New York, 1993, 47-86, 65
24
The eleventh of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point is to change it.’
25
As Hegel observed in the Introduction to his The Philosophy of History.
26
So Quine put it in W.V.O. Quine Word and Object, Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1970, 222
27
Lewis proposed this as far back as 1973. For a more recent version see his essay ‘Causation as Influence’ in
Causation and Counterfactuals edited by John Collin, Ned Hall & L.A. Paul, MIT Press, 2004, 75-106. The
counterfactual account of causation is not exactly new. To some extent it is a common sense one, a way of
explaining the concepts of cause and effect. David Hume inserted it into his critique of causation, as a kind of
common sense translation that links the so-called regularity theory of sceptical inquiry to a notion of what we
normally mean by a cause:

… we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the
first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not
been, the second never had existed. The appearance of a cause always conveys the mind, by a
customary transition, to the idea of the effect. Of this also we have experience. (An Enquiry concerning
Human Understanding. Section XII, Part II)

12
28
This whole essay has been a kind of sightseeing tour through disputed territory. The ‘philosophers’ here
include Quine and Nelson Goodman.
29
See Lewis’s Counterfactuals, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1973
30
‘Exit Right’, 2-4
31
214. It’s a famous book; along with E.H. Carr’s What is History it’s one of the two English philosophies of
history to have weathered the twentieth century with a bit of canonical status. Possibly Michael Oakeshott’s
writing should also be here, but a canon is a canon and canonical status is objective, the effect of a selection
process that exceeds individual intentions, so it’s hardly a matter of what I think.

13