Bob Hawke was a fine PM. One of the best. But he was not a fine man

Complicated life: Bob Hawke

This column on Bob Hawke begins with a joke and ends with a fistfight. First, the joke Hawkie told me. PM: “There are two dead bodies on the Hume Highway. One’s a dead kangaroo and the other’s a dead politician. What’s the difference?” PA: “I dunno.” PM: “There are skid marks before the kangaroo.”

All the funnier coming from a prime minister, Hawke’s joke began my collection published in 1994 as The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes. It sold a million and got us through a drought. Thanks Bob.

So how did our relationship end in a scuffle in an Ansett Lounge, witnessed by a horrified Sir Arvi Parbo? Troy Bramston should have interviewed me for his new biography on Bob – I know a hundred stories, few of them to his credit. So let me try to explain the trajectory.

I was a wholehearted supporter of Hawkie’s when he was plotting against Labor leader Bill Hayden. Bob’s principal co-conspirator was the diminutive and aptly named John Button. Bill had elicited a promise that during the brutal negotiations, Bob and John wouldn’t talk to each other. So I was the go-between, holding two phones, one in each hand. “Bob says…” and “John says…” In this dishonourable way we honoured the promise.

What changed my mind, then? It wasn’t the affairs – of which I knew many, thanks to first-person accounts. Or his habit of wandering around hotel rooms in the nuddy, as reported to me by an aghast premier Kirner. There was nothing sexual about it with Joan, who was happy she “wasn’t his type”. It was just another aspect of Bob’s notorious narcissism.

I wrote satirical columns on the libidinous PM, saying that the vertical squirter in Lake Burley Griffin was synchronised with his, er, sexual activity. But later, it seemed to me, the bigger problem was another form of moisture: tears. You’ll recall that Bob often wept – which many saw as commendable, evidence of a modern manliness and emotional honesty. Bob agreed – he insisted his tears were proof of his extraordinary empathy.

Except that they weren’t. As I wrote, the PM’s tears, which gushed like the Snowy Mountains Scheme, might ostensibly be for children in poverty or for the victims of Tiananmen Square, but were actually shed for himself; they were tears celebrating his almost ecstatic empathy. I wrote it then and still believe it: most of the time his tears were fraudulent, theatrical. Sometimes he shed them in very close proximity to me. Accompanied by a manly hug, after a stirring speech on something, he’d dampen my shirt.

Is my view clouded by my deep affection for my late friend, the long-suffering Hazel? Perhaps. A little. But evidence for its truth lay in Bob’s enraged reaction to what I wrote. We became and remained enemies – as witnessed by Sir Arvi in the Ansett Lounge.

That enmity was intensified by my admiration for Paul Keating, whose ascension to the throne Bob fought so bitterly. Even my friendship with Barry Jones was an issue. Absurdly, Hawke despised his science minister out of jealousy. I remember an argument at a film premiere I was hosting. Bob made it clear that he couldn’t tolerate people talking of Barry as the ALP’s great intellect. As if Barry’s IQ could be compared with his own! Bob so loved the limelight, there was never enough to share. With Jones or with Keating or with anyone.

Yes, I concur with Troy and history that Hawke was a fine PM. One of the best. But he was not a fine man.