This time though the odds against Mr Keating repeating his Houdini act are much greater

This time, though, the odds against Mr Keating repeating his Houdini act are much greater. Labor has been in power for 13 years and many Australians believe that the government has run out of steam. Mr Keating pulled off his astonishing victory last time, when unemployment was 11.3 per cent and the recession was still biting, largely for one reason. They drew on his personal unpopularity among Australians, the man who brought them a recession which he loftily described as “a recession that Australia had to have”, offended many voters, particularly women, with his gutter political language and scared middle Australia by vowing to ditch the country’s flag, with the Union Jack in the corner.
Yet Mr Keating went on to win that election, the first in his own right after unseating Bob Hawke as Labor leader, and to increase the government’s majority in the House of Representatives in Canberra Only the foolhardly would write him off again. At the last election in 1993, the polls predicted a similar drubbing, and almost every political commentator in the country had written Mr Keating’s obituary before the campaign was a week old. That is what opinion polls told the Labor Party leader after he had criss-crossed the continent from Perth to Brisbane and back to Sydney, where he responded to the forecasts with characteristic bluntness: “We’ll fight like hell.”

Mr Keating has never trusted opinion polls, and with good reason.

“If Ms Collins wins, it will have consequences for all of us. All of the contracts already out there might begin to unravel.”. AFTER a week flying thousands of miles across Australia’s vast outback stumping up votes, Paul Keating, the Prime Minister, flew home to the unnerving news yesterday that he faces humiliating defeat when Australians vote in a general election in three weeks’ time. Even its rivals are praying that Random wins the case, which is expected to go to the jury on Tuesday.”We all have too root for Random House,” Mr Applebaum conceded. It said, in essence, that if two “complete” manuscripts were delivered by Ms Collins she would get the balance of the money owed her, regardless of whether they were published. The full value of the contract was $4m.While its lawyers argue in court that even the requirement for “complete” manuscripts was not met, Random House is presumably vowing never to enter into such a contract again.

Negotiated by her superagent, the late Irving “Swifty” Lazar, it excluded the normal publisher’s “acceptability clause”. “This has been wonderful for television and the media but it has not been good for either of the parties. For one thing, it is going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees”.Random House’s pursuit of Ms Collins is all the more perplexing given the kind of contract involved. But they are almost always settled, one way or another, and very rarely end up before a judge.”I think they could have tried to have settled this out of court by appealing to a mediator,” Leonard Mark, a New York civil lawsuit expert suggested. The publisher alleges that the manuscripts that she said she submitted in 1991 and 1992 were incomplete and, not to mince words, drivel.Disputes between publishers and authors over contracts and whether they have been satisfied are not unusual.

More gripping, especially for the industry, are the unanswered questions about the case. Above all: how did Random House get itself into such a public mess? And what will the consequences be if it loses?It was Random House that initiated the courtroom collision with a suit against Ms Collins, demanding that she pay back a $1.2m (pounds 780,000) advance for two novels that she agreed to write in 1990. It is the only topic of conversation”.It is not just that the lead role is played by the pouting Ms Collins, 62, to a script that might have been written for Alexis Colby, her character in the 1980s soap opera, Dynasty. “It’s a lot more exciting than the fiction manuscripts most of us have on our desks right now. The object of fascination is the slugfest now playing in New York’s downtown courthouse – broadcast gavel to gavel by Court TV – between Random House, America’s biggest and most powerful publishing firm, and Joan Collins, the British actress who, we all now know, also has a sideline in writing.
“I’m telling you, for the publishing world this, not OJ Simpson, is the trial of the century,” explained Stuart Applebaum, an executive at Bantam Books.