Born to Rule by Paddy Manning

Paddy Manning certainly doesn't do our PM any favours in this book.  Apparently, Malcolm Turnbull is brilliant, but he can also be arrogant and bad-tempered and lack judgement.  There is also a lot of fuss about an ex-girlfriend's cat which was killed and left on her doorstep.  Known to be an animal-lover, Turnbull actually sued for defamation twice because he was accused of killing the cat in revenge for a broken heart.  I don't think that anyone who loves animals would kill a cat! However, there are still suspicions about the poor cat, apparently.

This is a rather dry book but Manning provides all the details about Turnbull's great success in the Spycatcher case, his intricate business dealings, his personal life, and his Republicanism.  He also discusses Turnbull's fraught relations with Tony Abbott. The most interesting part of the book, I thought, was Turnbull's rather complicated relationship with his academic mother who left his father when Malcolm was only young and his struggle to get ahead when he was young.  I would actually be more interested in reading a book about her!

This is a good book to read if you want to know more about the new PM but, although the author tried to be fair, I didn't think that it was completely unbiased.