By special request, hagiography to the max, Dame Slap grills Dame Beef ...

That shamelessly deceptive header?

t's a joke of course. 

Dame Slap doesn't grill Dame Beef, she waxes lyrical, she swoons at the sight of her, she shows all the passion you might expect in a Heathcliffian romance ...

She is the suck supreme ...

The header: She is Louise Clegg. He is Angus Taylor. She’s not the woman behind the man; Refusing to play the quiet political spouse to Liberal leader Angus Taylor, the constitutional lawyer has one rule: ‘I wasn’t going to shut up.’

The caption for the fetching snap: The wife of new Liberal leader Angus Taylor, Louise Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

The pond usually likes to offer some critical or satirical commentary, as an add-on to the assorted offerings of reptile swill to herpetology students - a legitimate form of postgraduate study whereby all might earn their PhR's.

But sometimes nausea intervenes, and during the course of this 12 minute read - so the reptiles clocked it - the pond had to rush off to the toilet to upchuck a Technicolor yawn so many times that sensible comment entirely fled the mind ...

The pond even struggled to find the right sort of descriptor. Might it be called a great example of fawning sycophantic scribbling?

Did those few inadequate words sufficiently evoke the experience?

Whatever, no more splendid example of a hagiographic fawning and simpering has found its way into the pond in a long time, and all because a correspondent pleaded for Dame Slap to be given special treatment - and incidentally proving that Dame Slap has a heart as soft and as vulnerable as a marshmallow.

So sweet and tender and caring ... 

There is a Bogan River in Australia, of course. It’s in central NSW. On the banks of that river, just before Easter 37 years ago, a couple of country kids shared their first kiss. Not quite kids; she was 20, he was 22. But still, young.
She grew up on a farm near Tottenham, a small town in deep National Party country, west of Sydney, population back then of about 200 to 300 people.
He grew up on a farm near the small town of Nimmitabel, on the Great Dividing Range.
Her mother and father left school before they were 15. The first in her family to go to university, apart from an uncle, she was the eldest of six children, raised in a rowdy Anglican country family not shy about showing emotion.
He was one of four boys, both his parents were university-educated, and family life on their much larger country property was more reserved but equally unaffected.
She is Louise Clegg.
He is Angus Taylor.
Which means the man who wants to turf out the Albanese government is married to Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man, as the outdated might say of spouses of men in big political jobs. Put it this way, if Taylor has a chance, it will help that he is married to Clegg.
The entire country knows the Liberals and Taylor, 59, elected leader in mid-February, have a gargantuan task on their hands. The Liberal Party copped more than a bloody nose from South Australian voters last weekend. The party lost limbs, recording their worst result. Taylor must confront not just the incumbent federal Labor government but also a nationally resurgent One Nation.

There was an abundance of splendid visual distractions, Louise Clegg and husband Angus Taylor with two of their four children.

The pond was still struggling for the right sort of descriptor.

Would servile obsequiousness do?

And whatever had happened to that much loved character, always determined to instil awe and respect into naughty children?

Sadly MIA, and even worse, the pond discovered in the latest movie adaptation, she was again disappeared and turned into Dame Snap (and even weirder, Kermode liked the movie).

Will anyone remember the grand, lost days of a jolly good slapping?

Never mind ... settle in, remember, this is a bigly 12 minutes, never to be recovered ...

“I’m not very interesting,” Clegg, 57, says a few times before we settle in for her first interview.
Nonsense.
Clegg is fascinating and funny, warm and smart, an astute political observer, thinker and writer. Clegg is also a no-nonsense mother of four, a highly respected former barrister and writer specialising in constitutional and administrative law. She is also a passionate campaigner for grassroots issues in the country.
A fine mind
Clegg speaks her mind – and it is a fine mind – even if that means stirring up the centre right of Australian politics. Last year she took on the so-called national conservatives who, she says, are copying and pasting right-wing American political trends.
“Conservatives in Australia have spent too long being deferential to the left’s cultural fashions. But the answer is not to imitate the left by building our own moralising state. We don’t need American nat-con cosplay – we need confident Australian conservatism: freedom, responsibility, pluralism, thrift, respect for institutions and confidence in ordinary Australians to build their own lives,” Clegg wrote in this newspaper in December last year.
Clegg also took aim at the hankering for tariff-driven protectionism: “The same one-size-fits-all nat-con posture extends to economics, where fawning over America First protectionism does not inspire confidence.”
Taylor read her piece for the first time the day it was published.
“Gus walked in the door and said, ‘That’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ ” Clegg tells Inquirer.
Whose feathers? Taylor didn’t say – and she won’t either. But it’s not hard to imagine.
It was early December, leadership rumblings were reaching fever pitch and some Coalition politicians appeared to be enamoured by American nativist politics, including tariffs and protectionism.
“Then he said, ‘I thought the economic part of it was strong.’ ”
Taylor knows more than your average political leader – including the current Treasurer and Prime Minister – about economics. His background is no secret: awarded the University of Sydney medal in economics, went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar doing a postgraduate degree in economics, a highly successful businessman, the youngest person globally to be appointed partner at McKinsey.
It’s Clegg we want to know more about. Did she feel the need to run the piece by her politician husband before publishing?
“No,” she says.
Does she ever run pieces by him?
No, she says, just as fast.
Taylor had responded to only one other of her many published pieces.
“What are you doing?” Taylor said to his wife, after her first piece on the voice was published in August 2022. “It wasn’t accusatory. It was more like: what are you trying to achieve?” Clegg recalls.
‘I wasn’t going to shut up’: Going out on a limb for the voice
Clegg is unusual for many reasons, not least for her courage. She was the first barrister in the country to publicly buck the suffocating consensus of the nation’s legal community that supported the voice. Not many followed her.
“I said to Angus, you’re the politician. You do your thing. I’m a lawyer, I’ll do mine.”

Clegg went out on a limb because she was blown away by the radical nature of the model put forward by Indigenous activists and a small group of self-styled “conservative constitutional lawyers” whose proposal Clegg believed was anything but conservative. It would have entrenched, she says, “inequality of citizenship” in the nation’s founding document.

Another visual distraction ... Louise Clegg at Parkes District Court in 2017. She would later buck the legal community’s suffocating consensus on the Voice. Picture: Supplied

It reminded the pond in a nostalgic way of that onetime severe and stern character, here gone MIA ...

Such a sweet, kindly girl. It must have softened the old grouch's heart.

And yet the pond still struggled for the right sort of descriptor to evoke the experience.

Subservient, deferential, grovelling, toadying?

“I felt if I was to have any credibility within my profession, I had to put up an alternative model. I was totally swamped by people, by lawyers, saying: ‘Louise, keep going.’ ”
The former barrister did just that, continuing to propose a genuinely modest model in stark contrast to the radical one being put forward to Australians in the referendum.
Clegg does a wickedly good impersonation of Tony Abbott as she recalls the former prime minister ringing her to say the choice was binary, yes or no. That’s it.
She and Frank Brennan, a supporter of the voice, became great friends, engaging in entirely civil debates in churches and at other forums. She spoke at her old law firm Clayton Utz – one of the few law firms to accommodate both sides of a referendum debate that involved important legal changes to the nation’s Constitution.
“I managed to get traction,” she says. “But not with the NSW Bar Association. I offered that Frank and I would go to the Bar common room and give alternative views. I didn’t get a response. It was like they (barristers) were all told to shut up. That’s my view. And I wasn’t going to shut up.”
Meeting Angus: ‘He was good looking and worked hard’
Clegg’s feisty intellect was clear early on, even if her parents did not see university as her natural path after school.
“My father was a fundamentalist Christian and he still is. He thought that I’d become an atheist if I went to uni. He said: ‘Why don’t you go to TAFE in Dubbo,’ ” she says. “Until I got my HSC mark, and then he said: ‘Oh maybe you should go to uni.’ ”
The former altar girl did not become an atheist at university but she did meet a man with deep religious convictions. Clegg was in her freshman year when she first met Taylor one night at a pub near Sydney University.
He was more interested in a pretty friend of hers. But the young law student noticed him. “He was completely country,” Clegg says. “From the way he stood that night, to the clothes he wore and the crappy Baxter boots.”

So many visual treasures ... Angus Taylor, 19, on horseback in the Snowy Mountains near Kiandra, leading a group on a five-day horse ride. Picture: Supplied

And while Dame Slap had gone MIA, naughty children were roaming, wild-eyed and excited, and without the hint of a reprimand ...

What grotesque creature had turned up in Dame Slap's place, replacing severity and discipline with wild abandon?

Still the pond struggled to describe this new school.

Ingratiating, cringing, unctuous, oily, slimy?

Would "alkaline" conjure up the texture of wet fingers feeling all soapy and sudsy and greasy?

City boys – including city-born politicians – like to channel a country vibe with their smart RM Williams boots. Not Taylor.
“He was just all country and I was a hardcore country girl. He was good-looking. And he worked hard.”
Both from the country, their respective family lives were different. “We weren’t well-to-do. We didn’t have a big garden, we had a farm, we had a house, and the sofas creaked.”
The Taylors caught trout at their big dam on their sheep and cattle property at Nimmitabel. They weren’t establishment though, Clegg says, laughing as she recalls her husband’s father keeping a gun in the kitchen, daring the police to come for it after John Howard’s gun law reforms. But the Taylors were wealthy, their farms dated back to the early 20th century. Taylor’s maternal grandfather was a senior engineer on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. His parents were university-educated and dinners at the Taylors might include a retired professor of economics.
“That was not your usual country story,” she says. “All the (Taylor) boys went to university, too.”
But Clegg says any notion of the Taylors being toffs is misguided. Most of the boys earned scholarships to attend the elite and expensive King’s School in their later years in Sydney. Their mother, Anne, taught the boys to read and write before they went to the local public school along with 50 other children. Clegg learned early that education and a hard Protestant work ethic drove the Taylors.
“On university holidays, everyone worked, it was straight out to the paddock where we went mustering,” she says. “You didn’t sit around reading books or lounge around doing nothing.”

Oh it was full Wuthering Heights... From country roots to a Sydney pub meeting, a young Louise Clegg and Angus Taylor began their story, united by their rural upbringing. Picture: Supplied

Or maybe full Woman's Day or the Women's Weekly or New Idea?

And still the pond struggled. 

Creepy crawly?

O the cunning wiles that creep 
In thy little heart asleep! 
When thy little heart doth wake
Then the dreadful night shall break.

When Taylor wasn’t on the farm, he was a volunteer ski patroller in the winter or taking groups of riders out on horseback in the summer.
“I was a bit of a party girl. I had been pretty slack. I didn’t even know what a postgraduate degree was when Angus was talking about doing economic honours and he was applying for the Rhodes (scholarship to Oxford).
“I was like, what is that even about?”
Clegg came from a world of different expectations. “I didn’t have an underprivileged background,” she adds quickly. “In fact, it was very privileged because I was surrounded by love.” The boy from Nimmitabel noticed. On a visit to her parents’ home, Clegg and Taylor went for a drive towards a hill on their property.
“We used to drive to the bottom sometimes and walk up. So that day we jumped in the ute.
“Suddenly half my siblings jumped in the back of the ute too. The labrador was there too, along with a kangaroo.
“I don’t think I said much just, ‘Oh, sorry.’ But he knew I was embarrassed.
“He turned to me and said, ‘I have never met a family that love each other so much.’ ”
Clegg says their family looked Catholic, acted Catholic. “We had that feisty Irish republican thing going on.” Taylor’s family was more serious, more cerebral, more conservative.
“That explains one of the differences between us.”
‘A lot of talk about God’
Clegg was drawn to Taylor’s love of religion, too, she says, recalling their early conversations.
“There was a lot of talk about God and what God meant,” Clegg says. “I had never met anyone who was so interested in what it meant to be alive. Angus definitely has a relationship with God; he is a believer. I think it was partly driven by the fact that Gus had just lost his mother. She died at the age of 47 from breast cancer,” Clegg says, leaving behind a husband and four sons. Taylor was just 22.

By now the pond was well past the TMFI stage, both verbal and visual ... Angus Taylor's parents. His mother died at 47 from breast cancer when Angus was 22. Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled.

What was better? Gushing or slavish bootlicking?

Not long after, he embraced and was embraced by Clegg and her rambunctious family.
It wasn’t an issue that Clegg had a different relationship with religion. “I love going to church, I love talking about religion and God … but it’s hard for me to get there, to have a relationship with God. I can’t quite get there.”
When Clegg and Taylor were on the cusp of their careers – he was off to consulting firm McKinsey, she was headed to law firm Clayton Utz – Taylor suggested a seven-day horse trek, each of them on a horse, with another horse carrying their packs, through the Snowy Mountains. At night they pitched a tent or bedded down in one of the small huts scattered across the region, crossing rising rivers, trying to stay dry. Though it was late December, there was a bizarre snowstorm.
Was she being tested? No. Her country credentials were established. “He didn’t want to marry a princess,” she says, “and I certainly wasn’t one.
“I cried when we got back to Adaminaby and pulled in to get petrol on the way home because I thought, ‘That’ll never happen again.’ ”
Clegg gets teary only once, for a second, over many hours speaking with Inquirer. She is describing the support Taylor has always given her. “He changed me,” she says, laughing at her tears.
“He was really good for me academically. I worked harder at uni after I met him. He would never take credit for any of it, but he did change me.”
After they married, Clegg, by then the mother of a toddler, decided she wanted to be a barrister. Their families thought it was crazy. “This woman has a young child, she wants more children, why would she go to the Bar?” Clegg recalls.
“Angus was the one who said: ‘You should do that if that’s what you want.’ ”
And she did, topping the state Bar exams in mid-2000 when she was eight months pregnant with their second child.
One of Clegg’s friends said their children must have been the result of immaculate conception. Taylor’s career at McKinsey took him overseas for months at a time. Clegg says she can’t recall him having a single Sydney client.
Even as she was carving out her own stellar new career in administrative law, Clegg decided to do something out of left field. A woman who went to school with Clegg in Tottenham had been convicted for assaulting a man in the local hospital. The community, including her father, was convinced it was a stitch-up. The woman was a fabulously good nurse, Clegg says.
“My father rang me and said, Mary* (not her real name) needs you. I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t get a judge to agree to retry the case.’ I rang my criminal lawyer friends in Sydney and they all said they won’t allow you to retry the case.”
Clegg convinced a judge at the Parkes local court, in central west NSW, to do just that. Months later, the case was retried in a court, in the big smoke, in Dubbo.
Clegg retells the day the verdict was delivered in favour of the nurse. “People I grew up with, friends of my mum and dad, from my class, were sitting in the gallery of the Dubbo court and they were crying. She (the nurse) was crying because she could practise again.”
Four years earlier, Clegg’s husband had entered federal politics. Busy with her own career, and family, Clegg was – and is – an eager campaigner for her husband. Not every political spouse enjoys campaigning. She does.

Still the visual distractions kept coming ... Reflecting on Taylor’s unwavering support, Clegg says, ‘He changed me.’ Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled...

Smarmy, wheedling?

Still, families of politicians do suffer. Clegg says she found the early attacks on Taylor tough, especially the ones by Liberal politicians. Taylor was nonplussed. “Now I see them as a badge of honour,” Clegg says, understanding the attackers felt threatened by Taylor’s intellect and business experience.
Around this time, Clegg was also observing the emerging great divide in Western democracies, including Australia, between what English writer David Goodhart called the “somewheres” – people grounded by where they live, tied to their local communities through work and family – versus the “anywheres”: more well-to-do, educated people who work anywhere, their outlook borderless.
Clegg says it was clear that Abbott was channelling the “somewheres” while Malcolm Turnbull was firmly in the “anywheres” camp.
Clegg and Taylor straddled both, but she says they left Sydney’s eastern suburbs, moving back to Goulburn in late 2011, because they are, at heart, country people. She says some of their friends told them not to move their kids back to country public schools. “Angus said: ‘Our kids will be more privileged if they go to Goulburn West Public School.’ ”

A final snap, Angus, Louise and their four children at home on their property near Goulburn. Picture: Supplied

The pond realised it had no alternative.

Only vulgarity could begin to conjure up the experience. 

Either soft core, "brown-nosing", or a little harder, "*rse-kissing" (*google bot aware).

And yet even vulgarity was not enough ...

I am in tedious, unctuous verbiage
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, 
Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Clegg’s political antennae are sharp so Inquirer fired some quick questions at her: What’s the answer for the Liberal Party? “Liberals need to stand up for liberal values,” she says.
“We’re running away from them, shy about them, but liberalism is the only thing that’s going to stop the country going the same way as Venezuela.”
Can the Liberals win back seats held by the so-called teals? “Yes, we can, it’s tough, but we shouldn’t pander to them. Tim Wilson did it in Goldstein,” she says adding that economics is the key, as living standards continue to decline.
Does the Liberal Party have a problem with women? “Absolutely not.” Clegg is adamant that gender politics is overcooked.
“It’s time to restore some balance. Any professional woman like me who’s been raising children will know that when the boys go into the workforce, the young women are better off, they are getting the jobs, they are being promoted before men. Even some teal voters are waking up to this,” Clegg says.
What does she make of the rise of One Nation? “One Nation voters are not ideological. They are grassroots Australians,” she says, returning to her theme of “somewheres”. “They want authenticity and consistency.”
What should the Liberals do about Turnbull when he launches another tirade against his own party? That’s easy, she says: “Simply write him off as being Labor now. He’s no longer a Liberal.”
One final question: why didn’t Clegg go into politics?
“I would have been just another lawyer in federal parliament,” she says. “And the country needs Angus.”
Fair enough. But Clegg is not just another lawyer. Not by a long shot.

Did the pond mention it's been re-reading Vonnegut of late, and is currently on Cat's Cradle as a toilet companion?

“I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment”

And with quiet thanks for being perpetually astonished by the reptiles, a quiet prayer of thanks ...

“God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"

"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the

sky, the stars."

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look

around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God.

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly

couldn't have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to

think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and

look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!

Good night.

I will go to heaven now.

I can hardly wait...

To find out for certain what my wampeter was...

And who was in my karass...

And all the good things our karass did for you.

Amen.”

And speaking of sycophants and weirdness and strangeness ...