Oh, my. I do love when Crikey starts their daily email to subscribers with the textual equivalent of a king hit, and today they didn't disappoint, slamming former King of Mayo Alexander Downer in three punchy paragraphs.

What a bloody sook Alexander Downer is. His response today in The Sydney Morning Herald to Peter Hartcher's savage farewelling of him last week contains a standard-issue lament about the anti-conservative bias of the Australian media.

 

Given that the Howard Government benefited from a decade of cheerleading from The Australian, where Downer has his own personal and deeply-embedded spruiker in Greg Sheridan, the claim is risible. Though not, as it turns out, as risible as the rest of Downer's self-defence, which is entirely silent on such trivial matters as Iraq and AWB's bribery -- which we now discover extended to India as well.

Worst of all, Downer questions Hartcher's seriousness. Hartcher's critique was damning exactly because he and other commentators take foreign policy seriously, and don't see it, as Downer did, as simply an extension of a crass domestic political agenda. Australian public life is the better for Downer's departure.

The Peter Hartcher article can be found here, and contains a story that - if you can believe it - actually makes Alexander Downer seem even lamer than you always imagined. Apparently Downer saw Dick Woolcott (a diplomat who had worked as a special envoy for the Howard Government before becoming a vocal critic regarding the invasion of Iraq) at Melbourne Airport, and the following occurred.

Yelling above the heads of the other travellers, Downer called out to the back of Woolcott's head, "Loser!" he told me later. "Then I ducked down quickly in case he turned around and saw me." In recounting the story, Downer seemed to think it a very funny thing to do.

Uh-huh.

Alexander Downer's response to Peter Hartcher's article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald and you can read it here.

I like this spirited defence of his time as foreign minister (highlight underlined).

We set up the human rights dialogue with China to supplement ad hoc human rights representations because we made no secret of our differences with China's autocratic regime. We set up the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue with Japan and the US and supported the quadrilateral initiative with those countries and India, even though China didn't want us to. We did so because those initiatives contributed to the regional balance of power.

Those two initiatives - the trilateral dialogue was my own idea - helped to give a new dimension to our relations with Japan. So, too, did the decision to negotiate an Australia-Japan security declaration, signed during one of John Howard's many visits to Tokyo.

Crikey are right - he just sounds so sooky, doesn't he? You can almost see his bottom lip trembling as he tapped out that nonsense. Still, you can't really blame him. It's not like anyone else was going to step up to the plate and defend his political legacy.

Tags: alexander downer | au | crikey | fight! fight! fight! | peter hartcher | politics