Many Spectator Australia readers will recall the way Paul Keating taunted John Hewson in the lead up to the 1993 election. Over the course of twelve months, Keating did indeed ‘do Hewson slowly’. Keating reserved his most cutting lines for parliamentary debate, and one that remains imprinted in collective memory is this invective from a censure motion in 1992: “Mr Speaker, he’s going troppo! He is to be more pitied than despised, he’s simply going troppo.” 

John Howard wrote in his autobiography, Lazarus Rising, that, as exaggerated as these attacks may have been, they unnerved Hewson, which led to him making clumsy mistakes and put...