A Greek tragedy, Aristotle ruled, has three parts: beginning, middle and end.
For Arthur Sinodinos, the son of Greek immigrants, and the Liberal Party he came to serve, here is a tragedy in three parts, the end not entirely clear.
In the beginning, Sinodinos came to the stage at the right hand of prime minister John Howard.
He had been a modest backroom man from the Treasury with a fine policy mind on matters of finance. Policy and politics had blended when he worked for Howard for a couple of years in the wilderness of the late 1980s, and he'd come back to the office in 1995.
Now, in 2007, with the government barely a year old and in crisis, ministers and Howard's former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, falling on their swords or sacked, Sinodinos, the new chief of staff, became the steadying hand.
Sinodinos' unflappable counsel and analytical mind helped Howard capture an equilibrium that would keep him in office for the next decade.
Sinodinos, no self-promoter, was regarded by political watchers as decent and whip smart. By 2003, The Australian Financial Review named him "the most covertly powerful person in Australia".
He left the PM's office in 2006, a year before Howard's downfall.
And here comes the middle; the big-money world of Sydney.
Sinodinos, by then married ("17 years his junior," the gossips breathed), rented a harbour-view house for $100,000 a year. There was a Mercedes and a Jag. He refused an offer to become Australian ambassador to the US. Instead, he worked for merchant bank Goldman Sachs and moved on to the NAB.
And for $200,000 for 25-40 hours work a year, there was a position on the board of a company called Australian Water Holdings: deputy chairman, then chairman.
AWH sought to win a $1 billion government contract. If it had succeeded, Sinodinos, a man with contacts, would have received maybe $20 million. He has since denied knowing the corrupt Obeid family was allegedly involved in AWH. He didn't know, either, he says, about the laundering of dodgy developer donations to the Liberal Party's NSW division when he was division treasurer and chairman of the division's finance committee.
The end was already written, though who could know?
Sinodinos returned to politics in 2011, this time as a senator and soon, triumphantly, assistant treasurer.
And then the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption began digging in to AWH and dodgy donations.
The Abbott government needed Arthur Sinodinos, but couldn't keep him. He was stood aside. He was a witness, not charged, but these things don't blow away.
Finally, at the end of a lost year, the government needed any clear air it could find.
And so this Greek tragedy had to end. The question of an encore – sometime, maybe – lingers.
