Acrimony

Acrimony (pronounced ak-ruh-moh-nee)

Sharpness, harshness, or bitterness of nature, speech, disposition, animosity, spitefulness or asperity; a state of or expression of enmity, hatred or loathing.

1535-1540: From the Middle French acrimonie (quality of being sharp or pungent in taste) or directly from the Latin acrimonia (sharpness, pungency of taste), figuratively "acrimony, severity, energy" an abstract noun, from acer (feminine. acris) (sharp), from the primitive Indo-European root ak- (be sharp, rise (out) to a point, pierce) + -monia or –mony (the suffix of action, state, condition).  Figurative extension to personal sharpness, bitterness and hatred was well established by 1610 and has long been the dominant meaning, the application to describe even a dislike of someone “irritating in manner” was noted from 1775.  The adjectival form acrimonious dates from circa 1610 from the French acrimonieux, from the Medieval Latin acrimoniosus and, again, is now usually figurative of dispositions, the use referencing taste or spell now entirely obsolete.

In the West, democratic politics, sometime in the nineteenth century had, evolved into the form today familiar: a contest between parties or aggregations sometimes described otherwise but which behave like parties. There’s much variation, there are systems which usually have two-parties and some which tend towards more and there are those with electoral mechanisms which cause distortions compared with the results the parties actually achieve but the general model is that of a contest between parties.  What that generates can be fun to watch but what’s more amusing is the contest within parties in which there’s more fear, hatred, loathing and acrimony than anything transacted between one party and another.  Sometimes these hatreds arise out of some ideological difference and sometimes it’s just a visceral personal hatred between people who detest each other.

Paris Hilton (left) and Lindsay Lohan (right), September 2004.

In December 2021, Paris Hilton revealed she and Lindsay Lohan had ended their acrimony of a decade-odd, because they’re “not in high school” and the renewal of the entente cordiale seems to have been initiated the previous month when Ms Lohan announced her engagement.  In her podcast This Is Paris, Ms Hilton observed “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I just wanted to say congratulations to her and that I am genuinely very happy for her”, reflecting on the changes in their lives and that of Britney Spears, the three who had been dubbed “The Holy Trinity” after Rupert Murdoch’s (b 1931) New York Post in 2006 published the infamous “Bimbo Summit” front page with the three seated in Ms Hilton’s Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren (C199; 2003-2010).  Perhaps feeling nostalgic, she added “It just makes me so happy to see, you know, 15 years later, and just so much has happened in the past two weeks… I got married, Britney got her freedom back and engaged, and then Lindsay just got engaged. So I love just seeing how different our lives are now and just how much we’ve all grown up and just having love in our lives.”  She concluded with: “And I think that love is the most important thing in life, it’s something that really just changes you and makes you grow, and when you find that special person that is your other half and is your best friend and you can trust…that’s just an amazing feeling.”  Both recently became mothers and exchanged best wishes.

Acrimony in action

At prayer together: Former Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Parliament House, Canberra ACT, Australia.

More than one political leader has observed the secret to a successful relationship between a leader and deputy was to make sure neither wanted the other’s job and the Australian Labor Party's (ALP) Kevin Rudd (b 1957; Australian prime-minister 2007-2010 & 2013) should have listened, not a quality for which he was noted.  Winning a convincing victory and supported by a groundswell of goodwill not seen in a generation, in December 2007 he became Prime Minister of Australia with Julia Gillard (b 1961; Australian prime minister 2010-2013) as deputy.  Things went well for a while, then they went bad and Gillard staged a coup.  After the hatchet men had counted the numbers, late one mid-winter night in June 2010, the deed was done and with Rudd politically defenestrated, Gillard was installed as Australia’s first female prime minister.

Beyond the beltway, the coup wasn’t well received, the voters appearing to take the view that while Rudd might have turned out to be a dud, it was their right to plunge the electoral dagger through the heart, not have the job done by the faceless men stabbing him in the back.  The support which had gained Rudd a healthy majority in 2007 declined and the 2010 election produced the first hung parliament since 1940, Gillard was forced form a minority government which relied on the support of a Green Party MP and three soft-drink salesmen, all with their own price to be paid,  Perhaps surprisingly, the parliament actually ran quite well and was legislatively productive, a thing good or bad depending on one’s view of what was passed but there certainly wasn’t the deadlock some had predicted.

Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

A slender majority of the politicians may have been pleased but the electorate remained unconvinced and however bad Rudd’s standing had been in 2010, by 2013 Gillard’s was worse and, after a splutter or two, in June 2013, the long months of instability came to a head and the hatchet men (this time aligned with Rudd) again assembled to do their dirty day's work.  Rudd took his vengeance, regaining the prime-ministership and Gillard retired from politics though the victory proved pyrrhic, Rudd defeated in the general election three months into his second coming, the spin being his accession to the leadership being what saved his party from what would have been a much worse defeat under Gillard.  Pyrrhic it may have been but he got his revenge so there’ll always be that.

In 2013, Rudd had lost to Tony Abbott (b 1957; Australian prime-minister 2013-2015) who gained quite a good swing, picking up a healthy majority which conventional political wisdom suggested should have guaranteed the Liberal-National coalition at least two terms in office.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t until two years into his term that some in the Liberal Party worked out there’d been a filing error and Mr Abbott thought he’d joined the Democratic Labor Party (the DLP, Catholic Church’s political wing in Australia) and genuinely believed he was leading a DLP government.  Malcolm Turnbull (b 1954; Australian prime-minister 2015-2018), who in 2009 had been usurped as opposition leader by Mr Abbott’s hatchet men, sniffed blood and assembled his henchmen, handing out the axes for what proved to be one of the longer slow-motion coups.  It culminated in a party-room vote in September 2015 when Mr Turnbull took his revenge, assuming the party leadership and becoming prime-minister.

This time, things went really well, Turnbull’s victory greeted with genuine optimism which exceeded that even which had swept Rudd to power in 2007 but it didn’t last and Turnbull missed his historic moment to go to the polls.  Like Sir John Gorton (1911-2002; Australian prime-minister 1968-1971) in 1968 and Gordon Brown (b 1951; UK prime-minister 2007-2010) in 2007, he didn’t seize the moment and do what Anthony Eden (1897-1977; UK prime-minister 1955-1957) did in 1955, realise this is a good as it's going to get and to delay will only make things worse.  Things got worse and after the 2016 election, although the government was returned, Turnbull's majority was greatly reduced.  To some extent, the electoral reversal could be accounted for by Turnbull using the campaign slogan "Continuity with Change", ridiculed almost immediately because it turned out to have been used in a US television comedy as an example of the sort of cynical, meaningless slogans around which election campaigns are now built.  The 3WS (three word slogan) is actually a good idea in the social medial age but whereas Mr Abbott was a master at using them in the propaganda technique perfected by the Nazis (simple messages endlessly repeated) and made "Stop the Boats", "Big Fat Tax" et al potent electoral weapons, Mr Turnbull proved not so adept.  His successors wouldn't make the same mistake of over-estimating the voters' hunger for intelligent discussion. 

God expresses his disapproval: Lightning strike in Wentworth on day of Wentworth by-election, 20 October 2018.

That couldn’t last either and it didn’t.  He had problems during his premiership, some of his own making but most not and in August 2018, the hatchet men of the other faction staged one of the more interesting coups and certainly one of the more convoluted, the challenger, whatever his original intention might have been, acting as a stalking horse, unsuccessful in his challenge but trigging a demand for a second vote which Turnbull, reading the tea leaves, declined to contest.  Scott Morrison (b 1968; Australian prime-minister 2018-2022), a perhaps even too convincing a Vicar of Bray, then won the leadership against two opponents from the right and left and both improbable as prime minister in their own ways.  Turnbull resigned from Parliament, triggering a most unwelcome by-election in which the Liberal Party lost the seat of Wentworth to an independent, thereby losing its absolute majority on the floor of the house.  The dish of vengeance had been served hot and eaten cold.

Morrison went on to secure an unexpected victory in the 2019 election.  There’s been a bit of commentary about that surprise result but, given the circumstances, it can’t be denied it was a personal triumph and for the first time in almost a decade, the country had a prime minister who could govern with the knowledge none of his colleagues were (obviously) plotting against him.  His term has, like all administrations had its ups and downs but unlike many, ultimately he didn't gain a benefit from the COVID-19 pandemic and was defeated in the 2022 election.  Because the acrimonies between some of the leading figures in the new ALP government were well-known, political junkies were looking forward to a new round of back-stabbing and shark-feeding but thus far, the tensions have remained (mostly) well-hidden from public view.