Poor old John Hewson has been dumped as a columnist with the Nine chipwrappers for the great crime of being male.

Hewson should have counted himself lucky he had a column anywhere 28 years after condemning himself to irrelevance. We always thought he’d end up like Jim Cairns, pushing pamphlets on the streets of Double Bay the way Whitlam’s former Treasurer spent the last decades of his life occupying a card table by the doors of the Prahan markets.

Alas, the former Liberal leader has thrown a spectacular strop; a strop stuffed with media conspiracising to rival any Rudd rantings.

First came a deeply demented Tweet:

Then he threw a little tantie for readers of The Australian while keeping the nuttiness turned up to 10.

“They’ll have all sorts of reasons like ‘we need to get some new blood or we need diversity or we will hire somebody else’,” he told Media diarist Nick Tabakoff.

“But the real reason, I could see over a long period of time, was the increasing concern I was being too critical of the government and the strategy of Nine is definitely to be supportive of the government.”

Well, we can draw out all sorts of stuff (noun) from that, but let’s keep it simple:

• The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are rid a crazy old conspiracy theorist;
• Clearly, not even Sydney Morning Herald and Age columnists bother to read either rag if they describe them as “definitely … supportive of the government”; and
• With ranting likes this mad old Hewie will be at The New Daily chewing through your superannuation by the end of next week with a brand new column.

While “doing him slowly”, Paul Keating used to refer to Hewson as “Dr Death”.

Alas, as has been increasingly clear over the subsequent years and simply settled by his weekend rants, Hewson is merely Doctor Demento.