Who would risk being a government adviser?

Poor Tony Abbott. It would seem being prime minister of Australia doesn’t bring you to the attention of the British media. To come into its sights you must be put forward for a role as UK trade adviser. Then they will discover your existence and aim to destroy whatever reputation they didn’t know you had with the usual modern British charge-sheet.

This time the charge was led by Kay Burley. The latest advertisements for her Sky television show boast that Burley is ‘always formidable, rigorous, fair, honest and searching’, among much else. Perhaps Burley hadn’t seen the advert. Certainly she displayed no such qualities when she discovered the existence of Tony Abbott. She immediately asserted — didn’t prove, just asserted — that Abbott is a homophobe, a misogynist, a climate-change denier and wishes to kill the elderly. She then spent the next couple of days pursuing this line of attack (in a ‘fair’ and ‘honest’ manner, obviously) until Abbott’s appointment was confirmed late last Friday evening. By that stage the rest of the anti-Tory media had joined the game. ‘Pressure on PM to drop “misogynist” trade adviser,’ said the front page of one left-wing paper. A day later — the appointment having been confirmed — the same paper ran the headline ‘PM appoints “misogynist” Abbott as trade adviser’. If I were an averagely incurious young person, this is the sort of thing that would worry me. The UK government knowingly promotes women–haters? Who are these monsters?

But more exercising than the behaviour of parts of the media was the now traditional limpness of the Conservative ministers put up to defend their proposed appointment. First up was Matt Hancock, and even the NHS badge pinned to his lapel could not ward off the evil spell words Burley threw at him about Abbott.