In a strange way I will miss Alexander Downer. Nobody does pomposity or hissy fits better than him. Besides, he does (or did) have rather nice legs …

Bernard Keane, in today’s Crikey [1], writes:

That Downer was our worst foreign minister of recent decades goes without saying. Possibly he was our worst ever, but that’s a matter for foreign policy PhDs.

What’s more important is that he chucked in the job in the early part of this decade. From 2001 to 2007, Australia’s foreign policy was essentially outsourced to the United States – and not to the US State Department, where some good sense has remained under Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but to the White House.

Under Howard and Downer, we swapped an alliance and friendship based on shared culture and interests, within which there was room for disagreement and debate, for reflexive support for whatever issued from the mouth of George W. Bush or his operator, Dick Cheney. In doing so, Downer and Howard inflicted significant damage on Australians’ perception of our relationship with the US which, had Mark Latham fluked his way to an election victory in 2004, might have been made long-term. It is testimony to the strength of the US-Australia relationship that it looks to have survived the relationship between the Howard Government and Bush Administration reasonably intact.

In abandoning our foreign policy independence, Downer was guilty of two great evils, along with his Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues: leading Australia into an illegal, immoral attack on Iraq that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, if not more, and ruthlessly exploiting the – in historical terms – relatively minor threat of Islamic terrorism for crass political purposes.

Compared to those, other Downer f-ck-ups like our damaged relationship with PNG are fairly minor.

There were a lot of things about Downer not to like – but many of them he couldn’t do anything about. It wasn’t his fault that he looked and sounded like the British public school prig from Central Casting, and in some ways it was amusing that Australia was represented for so long by Boy Mulcaster. And the poor bastard never lived down the innocuous business with the Rocky Horror Show stockings.

But he was more like his predecessor Gareth Evans than either would wish to admit – long-serving foreign ministers, both with grotesquely over-inflated conceptions of their world influence, both somehow encapsulating the very worst of their parties and therefore, automatically, capable of inspiring loathing in opponents. But let’s be charitable – if nothing else can unite the divided citizens of Cyprus, maybe five minutes with Alex will do the trick.

In the end, AWB summed up Downer’s foreign ministership perfectly: the deliberate turning of a blind eye to the bribery by a National Party scam of a tyrant against whom Downer was at that very moment making the case for war, about whose toppling Downer would later boast – and against whose forces we would shortly send our troops. The wilful failure of accountability and the intellectual dishonesty of Downer’s response upon discovery – along with that of Howard and Mark Vaile – turned even the Howard Government cheerleaders at The Australian against him.

I laughed till I cried over Keane’s prognostications for Cyprus. In any event, his piece serves as a nice contrast to Janet Albrechtsen’s fulsome accolade in the Oz [2] earlier this week:

Alexander Downer, our longest serving foreign minister, will announce his retirement from politics this week. When he departs, the Liberal Party will lose one of this country’s staunchest defenders of individual liberty and conservatism. Sure, the Left will cheer his departure. Let them. It will be a sign of Downer’s contribution to conservative politics in Australia if his departure is applauded by his critics. 

…

Downer has always preferred a robust free market of ideas. Start with his maiden speech in February 1985, where he called for national leadership based on a definable set of values, rather than a craving for popularity. And finish with his comments to The Australian at the weekend to mark his departure, where he criticised the current mood that favours symbolism over substance. Downer will go down in history as one of this nation's best advocates of conservative principles.

Not perfect, of course. Some of the policies taken by the Howard Government during Downer's time as foreign minister (namely Iraq) have been attacked by conservatives. Fair enough. But Downer stood ready to defend Australia's involvement in Iraq as the best way to bring freedom to the Iraqis.

Never fazed by his critics, no matter how shrill or persistent – and over Iraq, the critics were both - Downer had that rare quality missing in many politicians. He had a temperament suited to politics, one that fused good humour with straight shooting talk. No hissy fits. No hiding from the media. Keating's remark that Downer was the "idiot son of the aristocracy" revealed much more about the jealousies and class warfare instincts of the former Labor PM than it did about Downer.

Downer may have been born into a prominent Liberal Party family – his father, Sir Alexander Downer was a former Liberal Party cabinet minister - but he developed a passion for politics and ideas that, if we are honest, rarely accompanies a silver spoon. Few were more effective in defending the Liberal Party and Howard Government policy. And for a former diplomat, Downer was refreshingly free of verbose, say-nothing diplomatic-speak.

That’s right, Janet, never let the facts get in the way of a good dollop of revisionist sycophancy.