Alan Jones’s ‘pick and stick’ mates face a difficult decision

Alan Jones had just launched a book of bush poetry by his old mate Murray Hartin, a rugby man he calls ‘Australia’s modern-day Banjo Patterson’, at a harbourside Indian restaurant.

Dressed in an aqua jacket and strawberry trousers, Jones delivered a wide-ranging speech at Manjits on the Wharf in Sydney’s Barangaroo to a blokey crowd including members of his 1984 Grand Slam-winning Wallabies.

The broadcaster had used the occasion to praise VC recipient Ben Roberts-Smith as ‘an outstanding Australian’ and predicted ‘they will never, ever find anything against him’.

Sipping a coffee after the event, Jones was asked if had any words of support for NRL player Kurt Capewell, as video emerged of the Queensland representative engaged in a sex act with another man. 

Alan Jones has strong connections across business, sport and politics. He is pictured left to right with Olympic swimming gold medallist Grant Hackett, seven-time world surfing title holder Layne Beachley, Wallabies great Phil Kearns and former prime minister Tony Abbott

[The pornographic clip had been recorded seven years earlier in 2013 when a broke Capewell was paid to receive oral sex from a person he believed was a woman behind a wall].

‘I’d be supporting him,’ Jones told Daily Mail Australia at the launch. ‘Look, there’s no Mother Theresas out there. The bloke did something ten years ago for a few bob. 

‘The kid hasn’t broken any laws. He’s not committed a crime. So he did a porn movie or something. Hello? I couldn’t care less.

‘He’s apologised. I’m not sure he needed to apologise but he’s apologised. Get on with it and leave him alone.’ 

Capewell has since gone on to win a premiership with the Panthers, Roberts-Smith has been found to be a war criminal and Jones has now been accused of indecent assault against four men.

Jones has a long history of supporting young sportsmen in trouble, just as the racing enthusiast has a track record of sometimes spectacularly backing the wrong horse.  

He lives by an ethos of ‘pick and stick’, fiercely defending his allies and relentlessly attacking his foes.

Jones, who has never married and has no children, has also been the subject of rumours about his sexuality for much of his public life. 

Some of that stems from his close personal associations with young men the onetime King’s School English master has coached to sporting success with what can appear to be an obsessional zeal. 

Jones grew up poor in south-east Queensland and now owns multiple properties including a luxury apartment in the harbourside building known as The Toaster. He is pictured with bush poet Murray Hartin 

The former breakfast radio king says he intends suing the Sydney Morning Herald over reporter Kate McClymont’s reports this week he inappropriately touched four men. 

Jones’s lawyer Mark O’Brien described the Herald claims as ‘scandalous, grossly offensive and seriously defamatory of him’.  

The 82-year-old’s accusers are a onetime 2GB employee who alleges Jones has ‘wandering hands’, a waiter, an aspiring musician and a young businessman who is dead. 

Jones did not sue journalist Chris Masters whose 2006 biography paints a portrait of the Queensland-born farmer’s son as a closeted homosexual who has concealed a large part of his identity all his life. 

Masters noted with some sympathy that Jones would have understandable reasons to hide his homosexuality, if that was the case.

‘He could not tell the truth in the bush, in the schoolyard… or to the fathers of all those rugby players,’ he wrote in Jonestown.

Among the many young men Jones has mentored is aspiring media commentator Jake Thrupp, a family friend from the Gold Coast. Thrupp (above) has regularly be seen taking tips from his mentor on the tennis court

‘It must be hard to escape feeling ashamed of being something that was, until 1984 in New South Wales, illegal. Now Alan, like many of his generation, is consigned to a life without a visible partner.

‘The habit of secrecy and denial is ingrained.’ 

For those who know who Jones really is – and he has never suggested he is gay sex thai – there might be a motive to keep his secrets to themselves out of fear or loyalty.  

Jones has had long and strong friendships with alpha males including billionaire James Packer, larrikin businessman and ladies’ man John Singleton and former prime Tony Abbott.