He kissed me on the lips. Nothing else occurred. It was not particularly passionate. It was more nervous. I felt quite awkward. But I agreed to go back to his office and I knew that’s what he intended to do so I wasn’t surprised when he did it.”

According to Chantelois’ version of events: “This first kiss occurred not long before I ceased employment at Parliament House. I didn’t want to stay at work in this situation. I felt that I couldn’t tell my husband what had happened but I wanted to get out of that environment.

“Then the relationship became more serious. Shortly after I left Parliament House the phone calls between us began and became quite frequent. I remember saying to him at one point, ‘Do you really want me to call you?’ and he said words to the effect, ‘Yes, I do’,” Chantelois claimed.

Rann has strongly denied her version of events, and he has described his relationship with Ms Chantelois as a “friendship that was based on confidences and discussions”.

He denies having had sex with that woman.

Now what is not in dispute is that Ms Chantelois’ husband was getting a mite suspicious of this close friendship.

Rick Phillips believed he had good reason to be jealous, and the couple split.

Then came the night of October 1 this year at a Labor fundraiser held at the national wine centre, where, coincidentally, Mr Rann and Sasha had been married.

“SA Premier Mike Rann has been assaulted while attending a function at the National Wine Centre in Adelaide,” reported The Advertiser the next day.

“He suffered bruising and a minor cut to his face... Police Acting Inspector Rob Badenock said Mr Rann was struck under the eye with a rolled-up magazine.”

The Advertiser threw three reporters on the story, including the experienced Paul Starick, but they held back from suggesting a motive even though there were plenty of eyewitnesses who heard the man say, “Remember my wife!”.

The next day, the first denial.

He was asked if he knew the man who attacked him.

“I have never met him before,” Rann replied, still sporting the shiner, and then continued in the same breath about how wonderful the police were.

“I have great faith in the SA police. They are terrific and these things happen from time to time. I had some incidents a few years ago at a football club. It’s happened to me a couple of times before, once at a poetry reading in 1994 and then again at a football club a few years ago. Basically, I intend to continue to be accessible…”

Reporters sometimes fly by the seat of their pants, and sometimes smell what usually soils those garments.

“You say you’ve never met him before. Do you know what he meant by what he said to you?” asked Channel Nine and

The Independent Weekly’s Tom Richardson.

“No, I don’t,” replied the Premier.

IF A STRANGER OR EVEN a casual acquaintance were to ask you if you’d ever in your life had a married lover, you – being honest – might tell them to bugger off.

None of their bloody business. Or you might not tell the whole story. You might boast that you have when you

haven’t.

It’s none of our business if Premier Mike Rann has or he hasn’t.

But it is our business if any Premier does not tell us the full story, or half the story.

Then it becomes our business.

That is not to say Rann is not telling the truth, but rather the point is that the public has a right to hold him accountable as their premier.

It appears Rann well knew the wounded husband suspected an affair, that the marriage had broken up, that the husband had attempted to contact him by email and text.

He also would have found it hard not to hear the attacker shouting: “Remember my wife!”

When asked on October 2, the day after the assault, Rann said he did not know the attacker’s identity, or the reason for the assault.

He said, when asked on October 2, that he didn’t know what “Remember my wife” was about.

It seems that he knew about the marriage breakup and that he knew the husband had already accused him of conduct unbecoming.

Four days after the incident, Mr Rann decided to take another approach.

He gave the impression that he was the scourge of crime gangs who wanted him dead, and that this attack was just one of a series of events to be faced bravely and stoically by a modest hero.

“Premier Mike Rann has outlined six months of personal abuse from various sources but says it will not deter him from leading the state,” gushed the ’Tiser.

“In the past six months I have received death threats, my children have received death threats,” he said.

“Our house has been vandalised. I have received hate-mail. I have put up with stalkers, fake emails, forged documents distributed by the Liberals trying to implicate me in corruption, forged receipts, defamatory mailouts, fake internet and Twitter sites operated by the Liberals, threats of violence, and now an act of violence.”

Fortunately, our man is made of stern stuff.

“Neither threats of violence, nor acts of violence will distract me or deter me from doing my job as Premier of South Australia,” reported The Advertiser.

But fear and courage are brothers. Mr Rann might well have feared that the link would inevitably be made between the

magazine and the marriage.

Labor “sources” were soon patting the hand that fed off them. The sources – now, as then, believed to be political strategists in Labor employ – planted the story that was certain to come out when the charge was heard in court: Mr Rann had “a friendship” with the estranged wife of the man who allegedly assaulted him.

These “sources” further said Rann’s wife was aware of the friendship and had “not expressed concerns” about it.

It is unlikely that sources so intimate with delicate conversations between husband and wife did not have a close working relationship with the Premier.

“I’m the victim,” he said repeatedly.

But within the Labor Party, ministers and backbenchers were already getting nervous.

Modern politics is littered with quivering corpses caught in flagrante delicto – men like NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Republican Richard Curtis, UK Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Californian assemblyman Mike Duvall who inadvertently (but hilariously) left a microphone open while he boasted of his sexual conquests.

Of course, there is a big difference between those cases and this one, though.

All those men were caught with their pants down.

Rann denies the allegations categorically, and there is no proof whatsoever that Ms Chantelois’ account is accurate.

LAST FRIDAY, Today Tonight producer Graham Archer, a long and sharp thorn in this and other Governments’ sides, began promoting Sunday’s lengthy report with his own story.

That set the hounds running with the hares, and down the rabbit-hole went the Premier.

On Friday he said he would wait until he’d seen the program before commenting.

He gave no hint that he’d been forewarned about the story by Chantelois’s lawyer, David McLeod (whose assiduous work for his previous client, the cause celebre David Hicks, had caused such angst for the Howard Government), who had told him Ms Chantelois was going public.

He had also been forewarned about the story by the reporter, Mark Riley, who had called Rann’s press secretary, Jill Bottrall. Riley told Bottrall the essence of his report and that he was seeking the Premier’s comment, his “side of the story”.

Rann wisely kept his head down and said no thanks.

But when your head is down other parts of your anatomy expose themselves, and Rann was in no mood to get a good kick in the bum.

Did he ring the largest, single most powerful Australian media baron, Kerry Stokes, who owns Channel Seven?

“I absolutely did,” Rann said this week, but emphatically denies asking Stokes to pull the story.

Crikey founder Stephen Mayne says that twice in the 15 years that Stokes has controlled Seven state premiers contacted him to stop potentially career-ending stories going to air: once in 1996 and again in 2008.

After the second incident Stokes failed to win a seat on the WA News board and responded angrily to suggestions he would ever interfere editorially.

In the days following Labor’s knowledge of the upcoming story, The Independent Weekly began receiving unsolicited anonymous tips that the Premier had advanced the career of certain women, and advanced them certain favours.

Such tips are inevitable in light of the allegations of the past week, but one would also assume that they are wholly without basis.

In the now-notorious Dodgy Documents Affair, anonymously sourced forged Labor documents led to the downfall of Opposition Leader Martin Hamilton-Smith, who on an outside chance might have won the next election.

Because The Independent Weekly’s tipsters were anonymous, we suspected they might be fake – and the ones

we have investigated were just that – false, but so tantalising they may have goaded incautious journalists to print and be dammed, just as Hamilton-Smith had.

Had a false story been published in this or any other newspaper alleging improprieties on the Premier’s part, then it’s axiomatic that any subsequent allegation made against him, even if true, would be less believable.

The private lives of public figures are discussed in newsrooms as well as Adelaide cafes and pubs, but the media generally takes the view that there is a moat with crocodiles snapping between private and public, and with good reason.

The media is known more for its rivalry than its monogamy and its readers are more or less familiar with the concept of adultery.

Separating private from public makes sense to all. Then came the broadcast.

There was Michelle Chantelois, on national prime-time television, making sensational claims.

“There was sex involved. There was sexual contact and intimacy involved,” she said levelly.

“He had me on his desk, his Parliament House desk, in his office. At the very end when it was finished it was almost like ‘OK, I have a meeting now, I have to go’.

There was more in the same artery. Monday morning, the early radio shows were going bunta.

Rann issued an arguably ambiguous statement saying he was “saddened” that the program included a “series

of allegations that were totally false”, but he didn’t outright deny the sex.

Had Rann said on Friday that he would never, ever comment on the story, he could almost have buried it alive, but Rann’s team lost its nerve.

Through an hour of snarling traffic south of Adelaide is the City of Onkaparinga, and it was here that Rann and his Cabinet met on Monday, four days after the allegations were first aired.

On a dusty mound – the ABC’s Matt Abraham called it “not the grassy knoll, but the rocky knoll” – Rann gave the media conference on which his political life would depend.

“As soon as you walk into one of these,” Matt said later, “the envelope closes around you. It all gets quite cosy in a way and there are people sticking their microphones everywhere. So it’s not a controlled environment, and many would say that suits (politicians) because you can pick and choose your questions and journalists know they don’t have a lot of time, so they’re shouting questions over each other, often chopping each other off.”

“I reject allegations that were made on that program,” Rann began, and then went on to reject allegations which had never been made.

“There were suggestions that I had sex on the floor of Parliament House, in my office, between meetings while parliament was sitting,” he said.

The Independent Weekly has not heard it suggested that there was love-making in the parliamentary office on a sitting day, yet Mr Rann told the media conference that the accusation involved a Parliamentary sitting day.

Rann quickly went on to say that on a sitting day his office is “like a train station, revolving door on grand central station which is constantly surrounded by advisers and members of parliament coming out, ministers coming out, staffers coming out, members of the Opposition coming out”.

The Independent went to Mr Rann’s Parliament House office this week. We saw no-one in the empty corridor. His office lights were off.

Ministerial offices are empty on non-sitting days when Rann and his ministers work in separated offices scattered around the city.

Rann and his advisers work a moderate stroll from Parliament, in Victoria Square.

With every sentence, there seemed more obfuscation.

“The suggestion that I would have sex on a golf course in Adelaide as a fairly visible citizen of this state is totally, absolutely ridiculous,” he said.

No one has accused him of having an ace on the golf course. The statement from Michelle Chantelois was they went parking, at night, in a darkened car on a lonely road next to the golf course, where even the indivisible is invisible.

Finally, it got too much for one reporter. He put it bluntly. “Have you had any sexual relations with her?”

“I have not had sex with her and the idea that I would have sex between meetings in my office, in parliament house, while parliament is sitting is so patently ridiculous that I would have thought all of you would have known that,” he replied, once again implying that if it didn’t happen on a sitting day it couldn’t have happened at all.

“Lies, damn lies and political spin,” wrote The Advertiser’s Tory Shepherd afterwards, “and not because that television

interview made you picture the Premier tabling Ms Chantelois in Parliament. Get mad because your Government treats you with condescension.

“Because your Premier has such a profound and obvious aversion to straight talk...

“What should be ringing the bell of doom is the way he immediately went into classic Rann mode, the way he swung into premeditated and carefully crafted sentences.

“Statements can be literally true, and simultaneously deceptive.”

Rann’s media machine is now in overdrive. Selected reporters were guests at Mr Rann’s wedding in 2005.

One normally invites best friends to a wedding.

Over the weekend some reporters reported unconfirmed and unsubstantiated fabrications that Seven paid Ms Chantelois not $50,000 but $200,000.

On Monday Mr Rann quoted those reports.

“I am told,” he said, “that she was paid an enormous amount.”

He doesn’t say who told him, but perhaps he read it in the papers. If there’s an implication that the more

the pay the more discredited the speaker, consider that MPs get paid more than most people.

You might have a thousand reasons to get rid of Mike Rann: Labor laws which can convict people and send them to jail on evidence more flimsy than we saw on Seven on Sunday night; Labor Ministers standing in Parliament, accusing people of criminal behaviour without a shred of evidence.

Broken promises on the parklands, Cheltenham, social justice, WorkCover, political advertising, misuse of public money – a thousand reasons.

But for his peccadilloes? We pay him to be Premier, not pastor, but to keep our trust we must know that he’s telling the truth. Now Mr Rann is refusing to take a test which will help establish whether or not he’s telling lies.

It won’t test whether he had an affair with a married mother of two – it will test whether he’s telling the truth. This is a lie detector test, not a test of libido.

Mike Rann’s problem is this: the Premier has made it a question not of whether he had an affair, but of whether he’s telling the truth.

Either he is, or she is.

She wants him to take a lie detector test.

Rann himself made the same challenge of another Premier, John Olsen in 1997, over claims of dishonesty.

Rann, then in Opposition, wanted the Premier’s job. Rann said Olsen had to take a lie detector test.

Now Rann is Premier, and will not take a test he demanded of somebody else.

What’s good for the goose is apparently not good for the headless chicken.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes, said Mark Twain.

Or, he could have said, while it’s pulling on its bedroom slippers.