honest J?

The following half-hearted effort’s already out of date – I started writing it before crashing and burning.

Always worth remembering that the term ‘honest John’ was first applied to our PM ironically by the union movement. I’ve always felt Howard was the most cleverly sneaky in his dishonesty of any politician I’ve observed. As Mungo McCallum wrote, he’s a consummate politician who lives and breathes political double-speak and knows no other world, has no other real interests. So, not surprising that he wants to hold onto the top job for some time yet.
The recent remarks he made in Greece are interesting for a number of reasons. They seem to me to reveal most baldly the methods he’s been applying for years, because both the arrogance and the gaucherie of this delivery goes beyond, I think, what we’ve usually come to expect from him. I note, though, that he’s already taking up the usual damage-control performance of man of integrity and innocence besmirched by the media, wilfully misunderstood but not prepared to put the blame on anyone else, for he understands how these things can happen and he has the utmost respect for the media etc etc. One of his formulaic protests – formulaic but unanswerable – is ‘that wasn’t my intention’. Note also that he’s using the media arguments against him to back himself up – ‘it defies belief that I would use an interview with two journalists in Athens to make a major statement about the future of the liberal party…[the party I owe so much loyalty to, etc etc]…’ Sometimes, it’s almost convincing. Of course there are two schools of thought about the honest J idea. Some consider that he gets elected because he really does come across as embattled but honest to many people. Others believe he gets elected in spite of people’s doubts about his honesty, because everything’s chugging along quite nicely thanks very much. For me in the end though it doesn’t matter what others think of him, I have to come up with my own view.
With the help of others.
A few bloggers are now saying Costello’s skewered, and that apparently this was the point of the exercise. To indicate to Costello that there’s no Kiribili agreement, no promise of a smooth transition, indeed no endorsed successor. Some of the same bloggers are also saying that the most conservative prime minister in our history has no desire to see his work undone by a damp liberal like Costello. How do these bloggers know this, and how can they squeeze such meaning out of a few words spoken in Athens? I’m all admiration.