Dear old Mr Crikey should come down from the grassy knoll every now and then and stop seeing every bit of reportage as a clash between the egos of politicians and media magnates. Stephen, Paul Keating got exactly what he deserved in yesterday’s Bulletin feature.

There are other egos involved here. The egos of ordinary Australians who were left out and left behind by Keating and his advisers – formal and informal. John Lyons got it absolutely right in his feature: “There’s one person he’s never blamed – himself.”

This assessment is correct, too: “Gerard Henderson argues it was not Keating’s policy agenda that cost him the election: the Coalition supported most of the reforms and 80% of voters supported his general direction. It’s more simple, argues Henderson, ‘He was a smart arse and Australians don’t like a smart arse.’ ” Very neat, Gerard. Even put in Keatingesque terms.

Have a look at the introduction to the recent book The (strange, recent, but understandable) triumph of liberalism in Australia by the former Labor Member for Adelaide, Bob Catley:

During the last decade the chief harbingers of Left ideas in Australia have been the “cosmopolitan” intellectuals rather than the working class for whom they were intended.

The last time these ideas achieved a modicum of political power was during Paul Keating’s Prime Ministership. How this came about is made clear in Don Watson’s very lengthy study Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. This provides a detailed account of how a former right-wing Labour Treasurer elected as Prime Minister by 56 mostly right-wing Labor politicians, including myself, transformed himself into the darling of the ageing New Left. Generally, this involved re- staffing his office with appropriate personnel pursuing their chosen icons — arts, indigenous, gender, deficits, infrastructure, multicultural, Asian engagement — and producing one of the worst electoral defeats in Labor Party history, in which a majority of blue collar working class males voting against it for the first time in over half a century. After some recovery in 1998 a similar disaster was unfurled in 2001; and then again in 2004.

Exactly. Keating is a great man – but was an even greater number two. As treasurer, to Bob Hawke. Don Watson, Phillip Adams, Leo Schofield… I’d rather be poking around Queen Street, Woollahra, or down on Challis Avenue than anywhere near Baulkham Hills – but geeze you blokes have got a lot to answer for! Stuffing the brain of a bright working class lad with all those high-fallutin’ ideas…

More from The Bulletin:

As treasurer, says Henderson, it didn’t matter that Keating was flamboyant. Howard by contrast, he says, has carefully crafted his image, listening courteously to anyone who speaks to him. Hawke, likewise, moderated his language, personality and drinking. “Keating had a fan club patting him on the back but not many people telling him he should do this or shouldn’t do that. The successful PMs have all been cautious types.” In the end, history is likely to view his judgment as flawed. He had come from a tough part of the country, and claimed to know what working-class Australians wanted. But he was seduced by the international world. Working-class voters – traditional Labor voters who switched to Howard – were waiting for him with baseball bats, as former Queensland leader Wayne Goss put it. Howard filled the gap, and hasn’t given Labor a look-in since.

As those old-style Labor voters used to say, blud oath!