Kimberley Kitching and Andrew Landeryou in 2016 (Image: AAP /Tracey Nearmy)

During the eulogy at his wife Kimberley Kitching’s funeral, Andrew Landeryou pointed out the “cantankerous cabal” inside Labor that had bullied and tormented the late Victorian senator. 

But for years Landeryou was the Labor right faction’s bully-in-chief and an acknowledged master of the black arts of factional war.

His name was synonymous with VexNews, a blog that exploited loopholes in Australia’s defamation laws to slander his personal enemies and anyone who came after his long-time friend Bill Shorten and his own Labor-right cabal, particularly journalists (Crikey reporters past and present among them). 

A storied past

His harassment didn’t stop online. In 2012 he was accused of stalking and hitting someone with his car at slow speed, claims he denied. His defamatory attacks against Fairfax reporters were well known, including his vendetta against the “Age five”, whose access to Labor databases he compared with the News Corp hacking scandal. 

VexNews was taken down ahead of Kitching’s preselection in 2016, but some of it remains online here. 

As Crikey wrote in 2016, Landeryou is the son of Bill Landeryou, who was a minister in the Cain government for eight minutes before being sacked by premier John Cain.

Landeryou Jr was president of the Melbourne University Student Union (MUSU) before being sacked by a student recall vote. Later he was involved with a housing investment venture that used the MUSU as collateral, driving it bankrupt. Fallout from the affair included then-MUSU president Darren Ray going to prison for six months.

Subsequently, Landeryou established an online gambling venture that went bust, and he went to Costa Rica, allegedly without giving Kitching any notice of his departure (their Parkville mansion, Wardlow, used in the Phryne Fisher TV series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, had to be sold from under Kitching).

Returning on the basis of an arrest warrant, he was bankrupted, and used the bankruptcy as a lawsuit-proof cover for his first libellous blog, The OC, and then VexNews.

The site was used as a conduit for information favourable to the subfaction of the Labor right run by Shorten — and dissolved after he attained the leadership.

In 2016 Landeryou was arrested for vandalising Greens posters in the Melbourne Ports electorate during the election. He is fanatically and obsessively pro-Zionist and regards embattled Melbourne Ports MP Michael Danby as a sort of father figure.

What goes around

As Crikey noted on Kitching’s ascension to the Senate, Landeryou’s blog risked coming back to bite Labor. “Everyone comes to Parliament with baggage, but Kitching’s is already looking heavy.”

Even after her tragic and sudden death, this has sadly turned out to be true.