If you are a politician who has, for your whole career, deliberately courted the cameras for your own purposes, you cannot expect them to just turn up when it’s convenient.
Here’s a tip, Barnaby. If you want privacy, stop giving interviews about your private life. Stop with the fluff pieces in magazines with wife and daughters, moralising to others about family values when you were already having an affair. Stop with the photo shoots with a tea towel showing how domesticated you are in your new digs provided free of charge. Stop throwing your new partner under the bus by questioning the paternity of her baby and blaming her for the latest attention-seeking money-grabbing exploit. None of it is necessary. We don’t need to know.
For a person who was employed as a media adviser, Vicki Campion shows a complete lack of judgement in how to handle the situation.
The leaked snippet of next week’s tell all show on Channel 7 shows a tearful Vicki saying “I couldn’t help it. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
Oh yes you can sunshine. And what’s more, regardless of how you ‘feel’, you are in control of your actions.
If you have ‘feelings’ for someone who already has a partner, and those ‘feelings’ are reciprocated, then the decent thing to do is to terminate the first relationship before you have unprotected sex with someone else.
A drunken moment of lust is one thing. Accusations of drunken lecherous behaviour from Barnaby abound. However, an ongoing workplace affair that is known to colleagues, the deliberate action to cut communication with his family, the unprotected sex, are not some glorious expression of romantic love. It is total hedonism. It shows cruel disregard for a family and the inevitable public humiliation they would endure.
Barnaby took a week of personal leave in February to allow “current controversies to blow over”. Now he’s off until August because of the backlash from their latest interview.
Barnaby and Vicki would have us see them as victims. The promo of the interview suggests Vicki will tell us that she faced political pressure not to have the baby. That begs the question, from who? How many people knew she was pregnant and when? Did they know when she was gifted a job in Damian Drum’s office in August through to October when she went on “stress leave”?
Drum said: “I suppose what you have to ask is when does a casual relationship become a regular relationship? When does that become a formal relationship? When does that become a girlfriend?”
Ummm….having a child together might be a clue.
Relationships break down. The way that is handled says a great deal about the integrity and compassion of the people involved.
As for Ms Campion’s judgement – Barnaby? Seriously?
