“Not bad, is it?” says John Howard as I stand gaping at the sweeping view from his retirement perch, high up in the Sydney skyline. “John Faulkner got me this. It’s better than the office I had when I was prime minister.”

We are standing admiring the panorama – which stretches from the Harbour Bridge to the Pacific Ocean to the southern beaches – visible from Howard’s 53rd-storey official ex-prime ministerial office. The rooms were provided to him by the Rudd government after he lost the 2007 election. Faulkner was the minister responsible for Commonwealth properties and, given the loathing of Labor supporters for Howard as prime minister, it was a magnanimous gesture.