This week has proved the National Party leadership is a poisoned chalice, even when someone hasn’t been leader for years.

Within days of each other, John Howard’s two surviving deputy PMs, John Anderson and Mark Vaile, have been ‘cancelled’ by people not fit to lick their RMs.

As covered earlier this week, Anderson was cancelled by the preselectors of his own party when, last Friday, he was passed over for Senate preselection by some party hack whose name no one remembers, but who was a former president of the Young Liberals — which apparently trumps being a mere former Deputy Prime Minister.

Vaile was about to commence as Chancellor of the University of Newcastle, but on Monday withdrew after a concerted and nastily personal campaign against him by university academics, staff and – reprehensibly – donors.

Why? Because he is chairman of a coal mining company, and those taxpayer-funded children of Gaia couldn’t stomach that. That Vaile also chairs a company with a billion dollars tied up in wind and solar energy assets didn’t cut it with the baying mob, who are jealous of their own academic freedoms but want to destroy those don’t think exactly like them.

Ironically, the best comment on Vaile’s ‘cancellation’ came from realist Labor MP and former political opponent, Joel Fitzgibbon. He labelled it ‘the new McCarthyism’, saying, ‘In Australia today, the blacklist is not so shadowy. Mark Vaile’s listing has been very public. The crime he has been publicly shamed for is his association with the coal industry’.

Fitzgibbon also rightly pointed out this was also an insult to tens of thousands of Newcastle and Hunter region people working in the coal industry, true sons and daughters of the earth.

Both Anderson and Vaile have done far more for Australia than any of the pygmies who have speared them.  They deserve respect, not humiliation.

Terry Barnes edits our daily newsletter, the Morning Double Shot. You can sign up for your Morning Double Shot of news and comment here.