Not quite right after all

December 16, Malcolm Turnbull’s most obsequious courtier, Fairfax’s Mark Kenny, dutifully relays the latest Prime Minister’s assurance that ASIO chief Duncan Lewis received no encouragement whatsoever to contact MPs and suggest that they follow the Turnbull “Religion of Peace” line on Islam:

Some suspect Mr Lewis had been instructed by Malcolm Turnbull or his office to lean on outspoken conservative MPs in a bid to keep them quiet.

Mr Turnbull’s office emphatically denied any such instruction had been given.

Today, December 20, via the Sunday Telegraph:

It was a phone call from ASIO chief Duncan Lewis to rookie Liberal MP and SAS hero ­Andrew Hastie that the MP calls a “a bolt from the blue’’.

And it is even more ­intriguing, when you know that the day before the ASIO chief called, December 9, Malcolm Turnbull had sat down with Hastie at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Perth and discussed, among other things, his views on Islam.

That same day, The Sunday Telegraph has learned the Prime Minister personally texted the ASIO chief Hastie’s mobile phone number.

Stay tuned. No doubt the press gallery’s court eunuchs will shortly report that the denial and contradiction were all Peta Credlin’s doing.