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Sex addict Hawke snuck mistresses into The Lodge

By TROY BRAMSTON 7:30PM FEBRUARY 25, 2022

Bob Hawke was a sex addict who had multiple affairs while prime minister, often facilitated by personal staff and federal police at The Lodge, and known about by ministers and public servants.

Hawke’s longest affair was with his personal assistant Jean Sinclair, who began working for him at the ACTU in 1973 and was on his parliamentary and prime ministerial staff. Sinclair died after a long battle with cancer in 1991.

“While he was prime minister, there were about four women he was having serious affairs with,” acknowledged his widow, Blanche d’Alpuget. Her affair with Hawke began in 1976, was on and off, and resumed in 1988. “Getting in to see him at The Lodge was (often) the only place that we could meet,” she said. They married in 1995.

Ms d’Alpuget, Hawke’s former union colleagues, ministers, staff and public servants, and his children Susan Pieters-Hawke and ­Stephen Hawke, have all spoken candidly about his infidelity and drinking in a new biography titled Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny, published next week.

Former tourism minister John Brown recalled Hawke constantly pursuing women, including some he had just met. “When he was prime minister, he was terribly ­indiscreet, and how he got away with it I don’t know,” Mr Brown said. “He was the keenest chaser of women I’ve ever seen.”

The head of Hawke’s VIP protection service, Roger Martindale, recalled that officers drove Hawke to meet lovers to ensure his safety and not to draw attention. “We were all adults,” Mr Martindale explained. “He never asked anything of us. He just expected ­discretion from everybody.”

The book, which draws on newly discovered archival documents and interviews with more than 100 people, including Hawke himself, shows that Hawke was a deeply flawed person but also a very significant prime minister who was respected by Cold War leaders, and who left a vast policy and political legacy.

Accounts of Hawke’s infamous womanising and serial adultery were not widely reported and only sanitised versions of it, without naming his lovers, have previously made it into print. But Hawke was never faithful to just one woman and often treated his first wife, Hazel, appallingly badly.

Hawke’s principal private secretary, Graham Evans, was alert to the risk of the prime minister being compromised by his infidelity, and raised it with Sir Geoffrey Yeend, the head of the Prime Minister’s Department. Steps were taken to ensure there was no risk to the government’s integrity.

Ms d’Alpuget agreed that Hawke had a sex addiction. “Sex will calm people down, and he was a very highly strung man,” she said. “At the end of a day of intense activity, he somehow had to let off steam, as it were, and there’s nothing like a roll in the hay or five to do that.”

In the 1960s and 70s, some women threw themselves at Hawke, mesmerised by his charisma and power, while others phoned or wrote letters offering to have sex. Women were procured by party, union and business figures. Hawke also flatly propositioned women for sex. When rejected, he would often lash out with invective.

In 1975, Hawke was photographed at the ALP federal conference at Terrigal drinking beer and cavorting with bikini-clad women including Jim Cairns’ secretary, Glenda Bowden. Two decades later, she admitted the pair had an affair.

Hazel Hawke knew about Sinclair and Ms d’Alpuget, and probably others. “The affairs were, in a way, the least of the worries,” her friend Wendy McCarthy said.

“The alcohol mattered more than the affairs. She would not have been happy about it but there was nothing she could do about it. She was resigned to it.”

Hawke was also a highly functioning alcoholic. His drinking in the 60s and 70s was legendary. He would often go on a bender and sometimes had to dry out for days to recover. He got alcohol poisoning and nearly drank himself to death several times before going off the booze prior to entering parliament in 1980.

Ralph Willis, who worked at the ACTU and was later a minister, said Hawke became loud and abusive when drunk. “When (Hawke) got a bit pissed he could become fairly abrasive and fairly unpleasant,” he said. “How he never got his lights punched out a few times I wouldn’t know.”

Bill Kelty, former ACTU secretary, said Hawke often drank 20 beers in a session. “Bob would drink, he would f..k somebody, and he would gamble until 2.30am or 3.30am in the morning – and then when the ACTU executive started at 9am in the morning, he was the second one there and he was fine,” he recalled.

In interviews for the biography, Hawke acknowledged his unrestrained infidelity, excessive drinking and emotional outbursts which had a terrible impact on his first marriage and on his children.