A BBC history podcast once asked historians to nominate who they thought was the greatest British prime minister. The first episode named the very first prime minister: Robert Walpole.
Yet compared to his many world famous successors – two Pitts, a Peel and a Palmerston plus Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill, Thatcher and Blair – Walpole is hardly a household name.
Asked why this was the case, historian Jeremy Black responded: “Walpole is a stabiliser and stabilisers are unusual as heroes.”
This is as true as it is wrong. Stabilisers should be celebrated and a stabiliser is what our modern political miasma desperately needs.
It has now been more than a year since the Albanese Government was elected and it has rightly enjoyed a honeymoon period double the usual six months offered to blushing political brides. It has been refreshingly scandal free and defined by issues of – shock horror – governmental policy.
But as all romantics know, the first flush of love exists only in the present. Eventually our histories catch up with us all and ghosts of the past come back to haunt us.
For this government that spectre is just how close it got to exploiting the sexual assault allegations raised by Brittany Higgins for its own political advantage while in opposition.
And on a more personal and tragic plane it is also the ghost of the late great Kimberley Kitching, who was said to have been so mortified by this that she warned her fellow senator Linda Reynolds that the weaponisation of such allegations was afoot.
Of course Kitching – a loyal Labor soldier to the last – denied any such thing. And yet I hold her in far higher esteem, believing that she was in fact so repelled by the thought that this horrendous train of events would be set in motion that she sought to derail it.
As the ugliness of the past few weeks has shown beyond doubt, Kitching has been posthumously proven right. Labor’s involvement in the Higgins/Lehrmann affair – however marginal it may or may not have been – is now its greatest political and moral bedsore.
But as usual the Liberal Party is not to be outdone. And so right at the nadir of the new government’s fortunes – just when the very first weak spot was exposed in Labor’s front line – they manage to drop another grenade in their underpants.
And this was the allegations of sexual harassment or worse against Senator David Van.
There will of course be a soaring conclusion to this column that as usual prays for a modicum of sanity or intelligence in our paltry current polity but before we reach those dizzying heights let’s just ask a couple of quick questions.
How on earth was someone whose entire office had to be moved because of complaints about his behaviour not moved out of the Senate itself?
How on earth did someone who the tougher-than-nails conservative Amanda Stoker said had violated her remain on the Victorian Liberal ticket?
And how on earth did all of this get finally exposed by Lidia Thorpe?
These are profound and weird questions and they speak to a profound and weird dysfunction in both the parliament and the Liberal Party machine.
Meanwhile Labor will be drawing the world’s biggest sigh of relief that the laser has been diverted back to the LNP for a while.
But that is not enough. It should never be enough.
In recent years politicians have been inventing evermore rules and protocols dictating the limits of human interaction that are almost as creepy as their violation.
Instead we must surely return to some kind of sensibility that some things are so obviously stupid or wrong they automatically disqualify a person from public life not by legislative or regulatory edict but basic commonsense.
The true question isn’t “Why aren’t there rules against such behaviour?” – There are! – but why are such people in the parliament?
Ironically it is Lidia Thorpe who has brought the public’s attention to this very question.
When she first made her explosive allegations against David Van, many assumed it was merely another of her trademark political rants that struggled to meet credulity.
On other issues she has so debased parliamentary and public debate that little she said could be conceived as believable at face value.
Yet perhaps now she has exposed someone who has debased the privilege of parliament even more. Only the due process of the justice system can tell.
And this brings us back to the first ever prime minister of an ancient political culture we have inherited and a practitioner of the most important political value: Stability.
Progress without revolution, a win without a war. The impossible art of getting things done without blowing things up.
And perhaps more than anything the ability to distinguish between the personal and the political. To know that there is a difference between hurt feelings and public policy.
This will be the benchmark of survival for all future democratic governments and the men and women who comprise them: Are they guided by instinctive sensibility or teenage trends on TikTok? Do they need a code of conduct to tell them not to grab people on the arse?
Are they a wrecker? A radical? A dogmatist or douchebag?
Or are they the one thing that every nation needs: A stabiliser.