Shaun Micallef Refuses To Rule Out Running For Prime Minister; Would Also Support A Challenge From Cory Bernardi

Shaun Micallef is not saying he will challenge Prime Minister Tony Abbott for leadership of this country, but he isn’t ruling out the possibility entirely.

Speaking to Junkee just minutes after news broke of a move to motion for a spill, Micallef chooses his words carefully. “I guess it’s not really for me to say no,” he says. “If by some twist of fate – I’d have to be unconscious for a good period of it – if I was voted in, if I was offered the crown, how could I refuse?”

There are unfortunately a few obstacles. The spill motion — which was brought forward this morning by the PM, to take place at 9am tomorrow — might be defeated; if not that, then someone else might shore up more numbers; if not that, then Shaun Micallef isn’t a Liberal MP and is thus completely ineligible for election as party leader. Besides, he’s very busy. On Tuesday, he’s filming for his comedy news TV show Mad As Hell, which returns to ABC for its fifth season on Wednesday at 8.30pm.

“I’ve been back in here since the 6th of January, preparing all this material that we’re now going to have to throw out,” he says. “A terrible waste, a terrible waste of time. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just do a weather report for half an hour. No one’s done that before.”

In the unlikely and, to be fair, actually impossible event that Micallef does become the 29th Prime Minister of Australia, we could consider ourselves lucky. For starters, he isn’t a career politician and doesn’t come with the cynicism and slyness that path usually brings. When it comes to Mad As Hell, at least, Micallef doesn’t tow any particular line apart from a desire to delight. “We all prefer on this show to make it a genuine comedy show where you actually make jokes and surprise people in order to get the laughs,” he says. “The fun of this show is that we can have characters who can argue the toss on a particular topic, stupidly and for joke purposes, [and] we can have up to two or three different points of view jostling for centre stage.”

He wasn’t even that into politics to begin with. His interest in the field first came about while preparing for his SBS show Newstopia, back in 2007. “I started — as you must, in order to make a show about topical news — just watching the news. I hadn’t been a great reader or watcher of the news. And indeed Newstopia was more of a parody of a news show or a current affairs show; dealing with the way news was reported was more our brief rather than what was said in the news. Then, when we came to the ABC, it was about the content of the news – we got a bit bored of parody, so it’s actually turned into something that’s more challenging for me to write.”

The return of Mad As Hell comes just a few months after the publication of The President’s Desk, a comic retelling of the history of U.S. politics, and just a few months before the premiere of The Ex-P.M.: Micallef’s upcoming ABC sitcom about a fictional former Australian Prime Minister called Andrew Dugdale, and his struggles to acclimatise to life out of the limelight.

“The Ex-P.M. is a bit of an antidote to what I’m doing now,” Micallef explains. “Obviously it’s not going to be topical like Mad As Hell; it is more about the flesh and the blood of the people who do end up becoming politicians. It’s quite interesting to think of someone who is attracted to that; who would be attracted to that. What’s their motivation? Why do they think it’s a good idea? What are they pursuing? Is it their own glory or is it genuine? Do they wish to be of public service?”

The idea for the show came from a story Micallef once heard about former Prime Minister John Howard. “I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but it has a ring of truth about it,” he says. The story goes: three or four months after leaving office, John goes shopping with Janette. On their return to the carpark, they’re just gabbing away, popping the bags into the boot and both of them, still taking, hop into the backseat of the car, forgetting for a moment that they no longer have a driver. “That struck me as kind of funny,” Micallef says.

“And there was a lovely piece in the newspaper last weekend about Paul Keating,” he adds, “and how he devoted all his energies that he’d previously used to run the country into decorating his house. I thought that was kind of sweet too, just having to contend with just normal regular things — that you would not have to think about for however many years you’ve been in office — would be a real challenge. It’s a real fish out of water story. A Rip van Winkle story. I like those stories, where someone has to cope.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Micallef himself has charted a fish out of water, Rip van Winkle story. From insurance lawyer to cult sketch comedy hero to many-hatted mainstream darling, Micallef still carries an air of the outsider. He’s also humble, even self-effacing, as he describes his trajectory more as a string of fortunate failures. “I still haven’t got it right, but maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the secret: don’t actually excel at anything and then you don’t get typecast, people just go, ‘Oh yeah, he was almost good in that, let’s give him something else and see if we’re not sick of him yet.’

“If you’re really successful, then you’re in some show that lasts forever and you find it really hard, once it finishes, to do something else. But with me it only ever lasts a couple seasons and then I’m on to something else.”

There’s still a lot he’d like to do. He wouldn’t mind trying more documentaries after last year’s Stairway to Heaven, which saw Micallef travelling to India to learn about Hinduism. Radio might be on the cards too, and maybe a bit of theatre. “It’s like Mexican food,” he says of his career, and the many flavours it’s taken to date. “I’ve got basic ingredients, and I just keep folding them in different ways, and different meals result from it. That’s the fun of it, I think; just trying to get as many variations of whatever it is I can do as possible.”

We’re yet to see – and most likely will never see – if Prime Minister of Australia is another variation of whatever it is he can do. Micallef doesn’t appear overly concerned; all he wants in his stead is a ridiculous person in power. “I quite like Malcolm,” he admits. “I don’t know, though, whether we could have as much fun with him as we could with Mr Abbott. He doesn’t seem such an extreme fellow. Anybody with an extreme view, right or left, is sort of more fun, I think, to deal with than somebody who is quite moderate.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of this happening next week, but I would definitely like to see Cory Bernardi at least given an opportunity to run the country for maybe the length of our season. I’d be very happy if that could be arranged but I don’t know if he’s got the numbers. And Arthur Sinodinos maybe, if they bring him back in, as his deputy Prime Minister. These are vain hopes, I think.”

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The Ex-PM premieres on ABC Wednesday October 14 at 9pm.

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Toby Fehily is editor at Art Guide Australia and a freelance writer. His work has appeared in Smith Journal, ABC Radio National and VICE. He doesn’t really tweet at @tobyfehily