Bob Hawke thought his time was up in 2015

Bob Hawke nearly died in 2015. ‘Yeah, I was very crook,’ he said.

Bob Hawke and Blanche D'Alpuget. Photo: Harold David

Death skulked unseen through Sydney’s lower north shore in mid-2015, tapped its sharpened scythe three times on Bob Hawke’s door but the slippery Silver Bodgie did not answer.

“Yeah, I was very crook,” said the most statistically popular Australian prime minister who ever lived.

“They tell me I could have been on the way.”

In candid interviews published in The Weekend Australian Magazine tomorrow, Mr Hawke, who turns 88 next month, and his wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, give exclusive and harrowing insight into the mid-2015 illness that nearly felled the indefatigable leader whose mid-1980s approval ratings often soared higher than Malcolm Turnbull’s and Bill Shorten’s ratings combined.

“He was just so close to death,” said Ms d’Alpuget. “It was awful.”

Bob and Blanche’s candid interviews are featured in tomorrow’s The Weekend Australian Magazine.

The wide-ranging and reflective interviews see the irrepressible “Bob and Blanche” double act canvass everything from Malcolm Turnbull — he’s crippled by the “shame of compromise” — to monogamy — “a crooked system” — to Mr Hawke’s failures as a father — “I had some moments of despair” — to the rage Ms d’Alpuget felt in the early stages of their not-so-secret love affair when the married father of three stopped returning her phone calls, and suicidal thoughts turned to vengeful fantasies about stabbing her lover to death.

“It was the love,” she said. “And hatred … I went through that dark night of the soul when we broke up and I came out the other side. I got over it.”

But Mr Hawke did not. He ­famously divorced Hazel Hawke (who died in 2013 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease) and married his biographer, Ms ­d’Alpuget, in 1995.

They now call their love a “spatlese”, a German wine term meaning “late harvest”.

“You know, a late pick,” Blanche said.

“Like good wine,” Bob said.

“It gets sweeter,” Blanche said.

“And I think that comes from within both of us.

“A greater ­maturity from overcoming, I hope, your flaws and hang-ups and silliness and that tends to fall away with age, if you’re lucky.”

“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” Bob said.

The interviews coincided with the release this month of a new book Mr Hawke has co-written with Sydney journalist Derek Rielly, Wednesdays With Bob, the product of countless Wednesday afternoons in the past year where Rielly was invited on to Hawke’s balcony to smoke cigars and talk politics, ­relationships, Paul Keating, sport, life, love and that eternal and miserable wowser with the scythe who won’t let an ageing political legend enjoy a sneaky Cuban in peace.