It took several months, many dangerous COVID-19 conspiracies, multiple expert condemnations, one Pete Evans podcast appearance and one corridor altercation for the prime minister to finally call Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly into his office for a “dressing down”. But it only took minutes for that alleged dressing down to be widely reported.

The maverick MP seemed to have taken things too far for Scott Morrison this morning, when he clashed with Labor’s Tanya Plibersek in the media gallery corridor over his views on COVID treatments. Kelly approached the former health minister and ended up in a three-minute argument, complete with finger wagging and rants, all caught on camera. Plibersek told Kelly that her mother lived in his electorate of Hughes, and didn’t want her exposed to people who didn’t get vaccinated because of his conspiracy mongering. But for the most part, Plibersek kept asking if Morrison agreed with him. “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the prime minister,” Kelly replied.

Kelly, meanwhile, continued to push his claims, defending himself by citing a Sydney Morning Herald story, in which retired immunologist Robert Clancy said he was “absolutely right” on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (Clancy also said they “mustn’t be used instead of a vaccine”). He followed up the confrontation with a mini press conference, yet again questioning the official health advice and claiming at least a dozen of his colleagues had privately told him they agreed with him.

Two hours later it was widely reported that the prime minister had since “hauled Craig Kelly into his office for a dressing down” – with journalists often using almost exactly the same wording, as many Twitter users pointed out. The story appears to have been pushed out by the PM’s own office before being faithfully reported by the media, with #ThisisNotJournalism soon trending. How real or serious this “dressing down” was has also become a point of contention, following doubts over the seriousness of an earlier “dressing down” phone call (reported to have occurred on Tuesday). Kelly publicly doubted vaccines and pushed alternative treatments well into the night, both in media interviews and on his Facebook page, and told 10 News, well after the alleged Tuesday call, that he had not been told to rein it in by Morrison.

Did Morrison, who for days has been refusing to condemn Kelly when asked (or motioned, as Labor attempted on Tuesday), truly believe that Kelly went too far in his clash with Plibersek, after months of undermining the government’s health advice? Did he really, finally rebuke Kelly, or was this carefully calibrated political spin, as Morrison’s hands-off approach becomes untenable? At the very least, Morrison wanted his disapproval out there, and that must count for something.

Today’s face-to-face appears to have had some small effect, with Kelly releasing a statement saying he “agreed to support the government’s vaccine rollout which has been endorsed by the medical experts”. The statement continued: “I believe the spread of misinformation can damage the success of our public health response during the pandemic.” 

Funny that: his highly influential, highly interactive Facebook page remains littered with posts about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, while the statement agreeing to support the vaccine rollout is nowhere to be seen.

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