Some minutes before a scraggly Q&A audience member threw his shoes at John Howard, the former prime minister said he was ‘in broad agreement with the thrust’ of last week’s cover editorial in this magazine titled ‘Howard the Great’.
Some minutes before a scraggly Q&A audience member threw his shoes at John Howard, the former prime minister said he was ‘in broad agreement with the thrust’ of last week’s cover editorial in this magazine titled ‘Howard the Great’. Well, we are not sure that were he to go a second round with Tony Jones, he’d be so positive about this week’s Spectator Australia. Because with the official launch of his memoirs Lazarus Rising, we think Mr Howard has somewhat tarnished his legacy. Not just because he won’t accept the full blame for the defeat of his government in 2007 or for the loss of the Bennelong seat he’d held for almost 35 years. It’s also because he won’t accept the blame for staying too long in the top job.
True, Mr Howard was a great prime minister whose long tenure will be remembered as a halcyon period in our nation’s economic and political history. But it is also true that Mr Howard bungled his exit strategy: as the old saying goes, the time to leave a party is when everyone wants you to stay.
Worse, in using his memoirs to reactivate his leadership tensions with Peter Costello, Mr Howard has scored an own goal, giving his disproportionately influential enemies in the media an excuse to focus on what should be a trivial blemish on his otherwise impressive legacy. This is why it is unfortunately true that while, as we said last week, Mr Howard was a great PM, he will never be on a par with Sir Robert Menzies, our longest-serving prime minister, who not only retired at a time of his choosing but set the scene for an orderly (and successful) generational transition of power. Rather than apply his usual principled logic to the problem of leadership and legacy, he has become trapped in a forest of non sequiturs.
Thus, Mr Howard has taken the opportunity to settle scores, describing Mr Costello with incendiary language such as ‘elitist’, ‘appalling conduct’ and ‘not a good listener’. Mr Howard goes further down this illogical rabbit hole in his book, complaining about Mr Costello’s allegedly ‘ex post facto rationalisations’ about not wanting to put the party through the turmoil of a leadership fight, before engaging in a number of ex post facto rationalisations of his own.
There is no evidence that Mr Howard was planning to retire in late 2006. Indeed, judging by his behaviour after the following year’s Apec summit — he changed his criterion for retiring from ‘I’ll stay so long as my party wants me to’ to ‘I’ll stay so long as my family wants me to’ — suggests he never planned to retire and pass the torch of leadership to his younger, highly experienced and talented deputy. The result: an electoral debacle and a lost opportunity for party renewal.
All of this is a reminder that politicians nearly always tend to seek one more success. Their ambition pulses as long as their hearts beat. Perhaps Mr Howard was so obsessed by the verdict of posterity that he was never quite ready to submit to it. As Kerry Packer once sagely observed: ‘Politicians find it hard to give up. I have never yet met a prime minister or a president who wanted to resign. They all want to keep the job.’
Great in so many areas, dignified in so many others, and a man who remains a giant against whom future prime ministers will be measured, in this one instance, Mr Howard was sadly just another politician.
Keep Your Shoes On
In debating, there is a phenomenon known as Godwin’s Law: invoke Hitler, lose the argument. There ought to be a corollary to this — call it Kruschev’s Law — which states that taking off your shoe, or any other piece of clothing, to prove a point only proves that you don’t have a winning point to make. Recall that the Soviet premier’s famous shoe-banging incident at the UN in 1960 ushered in an era of protest that made removal of articles of clothing de riguer. Yet like the Kalashnikov, that other infamous Communist contribution to discourse, such protests are generally employed by the Left in service of bankrupt causes.
Thus Peter Gray, the Hunter Valley man who achieved his 15 seconds of fame by flinging his shoes (not well or accurately, mind you) at John Howard on Q&A was hardly being inventive or original. The attack, such as it was, was an attempt to ape the shoe-throwing protest against George W. Bush by an Iraqi journalist a few years ago, but failed to make its mark either literally or figuratively.
Mr Howard’s gracious aplomb in reacting to the flying footwear only confirmed what was so obvious during his prime ministership. By their vituperative nature, the Howard haters looked — and continue to look — far worse than the object of their wrath. No matter how much one disagrees with someone else, the best advice remains: keep your shoes on.
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