conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Political Animal about Newsnight, University, Challenge with the genre: History.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a journalist, best known for his work presenting Newsnight and University Challenge. His books include Friends in High Places, The English and The Political Animal. He lives in Oxfordshire.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence '"'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Political Animal
  Abbott had made the same, odd point in Battlelines and when welcoming Barack Obama to the Australian parliament in 2011. The Quiet American of Greene's prophetic novel was the naive do-gooder Alden Pyle, the kind of man with the kind of thinking that drew the United States into the bloodbath of Vietnam. Abbott doesn't often lace his rhetoric with literary references. What he was doing here had a purpose: to signal a deeper, perhaps snobbish fondness for Pyle's adversary, a cynical British journalist, a man who understood the ways of the world. When puzzling over these references to Greene's dangerous fool, commentators forgot that Abbott is, in the end, an Australian Anglophile. His old-fashioned rhetoric of the Anglosphere – which doesn't play well in Africa and the Caribbean – embraces American might but honours the nous of Great Britain.
  Abbott went up to Manhattan to pay the other call any would-be prime ministers must make in America. Though squads of his executives were under arrest in London and a Lord Justice of Appeal was raking through his newspapers, due deference had still to be paid to Rupert Murdoch. Nothing had changed for Murdoch in Australia. His censure was still feared and his papers were barracking for Tony Abbott. Not since they turned on Gough Whitlam had they shown such a united determination to bring down a government. Once home, Abbott heaped praise on Murdoch in the Spectator: "Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world."
  China feted Abbott. The officials he met were high-powered. His was regarded as a visit of importance. His address was not craven. He did not lay it on thick. How many times must Chinese officials have heard Australian dignitaries try to explain this continent's early wretched relationship with the Chinese? They know the truth. Why not speak the truth? Abbott put about as good a spin on it as he could: early Chinese settlers, early Chinese politicians and Chinese restaurants in country towns were "an early sign of our readiness to absorb foreign ways and make them our own." He even claimed for his party the credit due to Labor for ending the "embarrassment" of White Australia. But there were three tough messages in his breakfast speech to the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Beijing: we will never break with America, China must become free, and Australia is wary of Chinese investment. His real audience at that moment was the National Party back home: "Chinese investment is complicated by the prevalence of state-owned enterprises. It would rarely be in Australia's national interest to allow a foreign government or its agencies to control an Australian business."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ramjan is a respected figure in Sydney, with connections to the highest levels of the judiciary. But the shoring up of Abbott's denials required the destruction of her credibility. Michael Kroger took on the task armed with a Spartacist League news­letter from the 1970s accusing Ramjan of inventing death threats against her. Though his mortal enemies back then, the Sparts were useful to Kroger now. His first stop was the Andrew Bolt show on Channel Ten, where he accused Ramjan of lying about the punch and lying about the death threats. He also gave the leaflet to the Australian, which next day reported on page one:
  Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger yesterday accused the woman who levelled allegations of physical aggression against Tony Abbott during his student years of being a serial manufacturer of false complaints against her political opponents.
  That night Kroger was on Steve Price's radio show in Sydney calling Ramjan "an ex-communist who is now a nobody, a nobody attacking Tony Abbott to get publicity" and "lying and cheating against Tony Abbott in a fairly disgusting way." Next morning he was with Alan Jones calling Ramjan "a nutter from the left" involved in "one of the most sinister, nasty and vicious campaigns I've seen." Their grim exchange was laced with effusive praise for Abbott.
  Ramjan and Jones have as a mutual friend the colourful Sydney lawyer Chris Murphy. He spoke to the broadcaster. Next day Jones made an apology on air as complete and elegant as is imaginable: "Now, on this program we try to be fair no matter who is involved. Since that interview yesterday it has been pointed out to me by several people that Barbara Ramjan is indeed a woman of distinction who in whatever she says deserves to be taken seriously..."
  Jones did not apologise so elegantly four days later when he was caught telling the annual dinner of Sydney University Liberal Club that Gillard's lies had killed her father. A young News Limited journalist, Jonathan Marshall, secretly recorded Jones's fifty-minute rant:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Every morning Abbott saddles up for a long ride in the dark. For an hour or so, he is alone on his bike. Reflection is part of every working day, reflection and discipline. Ask him why he wants to be prime minister and he talks of values that go beyond personal ambition; of a vision he has for a better and more cohesive society where people might be their best selves. Over the years he has spoken of being a conservative prime minister who would bring his values to bear on a changing world: leaving well alone when he can but confronting the zeitgeist where he must. This romantic notion of himself has survived twenty brutal years in Canberra. So much about Abbott makes the kind of prime minister he might become uniquely hard to predict: his fine rhetoric and his brawling ways; his Catholic loyalties and his absolutely secular determination. He speaks as if power would resolve these old contradictions: that the politician who clawed his way to the top might then make way for another self, the one who set out on this quest when he was still a kid at Riverview. He isn't there yet. He knows he might lose. The months ahead are a political eternity. And he knows he might win only to find he is stuck with Politics Abbott after all. He understands the risks politicians run of making too many promises and too many compromises and sacrificing too many principles on the long haul to power. "You will find you are like the dog who catches the car," he wrote. "What do you do when you finally get that great office for which you have striven all these years?"
  Essential poll, 9 July 2012, asked: "Do you think the current debate over handling of asylum seekers shows that Australian politicians are genuinely concerned about the welfare of asylum seekers or are they just playing politics over the issue?" To which 78 per cent replied "playing politics." The 20 August 2012 polls were titled, "Approval of Recommendations on Asylum Seekers" and "Effectiveness of Recommendations." All can be found at essentialvision.com.au/essential-research.
  Polling for preferred Liberal leader: Nielsen poll, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 2009, p. 1. The figures were Hockey 36 per cent, Turnbull 32 per cent and Abbott 20 per cent.
  John Howard's polling figures, 1996: Herald–AGB McNair polls, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January 1996, p. 2; 12 February, p. 7; 19 February p. 1 and 26 February p. 1.