To say Scott Morrison was less than impressed when the country's largest banks settled on former Queensland premier Anna Bligh to lead the Australian Banking Association would be some understatement. "I don’t need to work through an intermediary,” the then treasurer said. It later emerged that his senior advisor Sasha Grebe, now supposedly running to be the Liberal candidate in Warringah, had also applied for the job.

Well, we'd love to see his reaction when he finds out who's in line to become Bligh's chief lieutenant, replacing former Coalition staffer Nathalie Samia — the ABA's public affairs boss who left the outfit in January. Because it's ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull's principal private secretary Sally Cray. Cray, a former corporate affairs chief at the ABC and a well-connected operator, has been consulting since Turnbull was replaced by Morrison in 2018.

Malcolm Turnbull's former principal private secretary Sally Cray is off to the banking lobby. Credit:Andrew Meares

But, of course, the timing is less than ideal. And we're not talking about the coronavirus pandemic. Turnbull's recently released memoir, A Bigger Picture, portrays Morrison as an obsessive leaker who was "playing a double game: professing public loyalty to me while at the same time allowing his supporters to undermine me".

Sources close to the appointment process say the internal candidate for the job, Fiona Landis, had been informed she would not get the gig. The highly-respected Landis has been acting in the role since Samia left.

Still, Cray's most recent outing — assisting the Health Department with coronavirus messaging — appears to have gone particularly well. The ABA's recruitment process, we are told, was run variously by Rebecca Tabakoff at Temple Executive Search and Melbourne outfit Anna Whitlam People.