POOR Tony Abbott. Here he was trying to defend his honesty by confessing he sometimes didn't tell the truth, when who should come bustling into the confusion but Barnaby Joyce.
''What someone might say to their lover in the heat of passion is entirely different, or should be entirely different, to what you say to the lady checking out your groceries at the supermarket,'' said Joyce.
It didn't seem helpful. ''Of course I'll love you in the morning'' doesn't automatically equate with ''No cash out, thanks''. Unless Joyce and Abbott, who were both schooled by the Jesuits, know something about Jesuitical logic that we don't.
What was Joyce saying? That Tony Abbott couldn't lie straight in or out of bed? Abbott's Labor opponents thought it would be useful to suggest just that.
Hardly had the closing credits on Monday night's 7.30 Report spooled across the nation's screens before the ALP was cranking out a YouTube attack video headlined ''Tony Abbott - You can't trust anything he says''.
''The next time Tony Abbott says anything, ask yourself is he telling the truth,'' invites the voice-over. ''By his own admission, he is probably lying.''
By mid-morning, the entire nation seemed to be arguing with itself over Abbott's admission that he didn't always tell the gospel truth unless it was prepared and scripted.
The airwaves were shrilling with talkback callers who variously expounded that Abbott was stating the obvious about politicians, was a mendacious fraud, had blown his career to smithereens or was proving a breath of fresh air in a fetid swamp. Bloggers were furiously pounding out their positions, Twitter was alive with the debate and it was standing room only at office water-bubblers.
Labor MPs and staffers sweated over a cut-through phrase that would cause ruination to Abbott's reputation, settling on ''Phoney Tony''.
Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese took the courageous step of proclaiming that ''I have never consciously said something that was wrong and every time I speak I try to tell the absolute truth''. Albanese, a lifelong warrior in the New South Wales Labor factional wars, was clearly superior to fellow ALP Sydneysider and former senator Graham Richardson, whose literary account of Labor politics, Whatever It Takes, includes the immortal lines: ''You have to lie to keep your job. If you have to lie, it is probably a good system.''
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, possibly relieved that, suddenly, no one was accusing him of abandoning his principles, remained sanguine. It was a matter for Abbott to explain what he meant, said the PM. Liberal staffers obligingly pumped out a 50-page dossier headed ''The Rudd Government's Broken Promises''
Tony Wright is national affairs editor of The Age
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