“I’m back, I’m back, as a matter of fact I’m back,” as Gary Glitter once said – but my current mood is more like that of another controversial Pom when he opined, “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

It’s not just because after a week on leave amongst the cows of Donnybrook it’s clear that they’re preferable to the bovine creatures of Canberra. Another herd – or herd mentality – is giving cause for foreboding. Rod Liddle described it perfectly in The Spectator last month as “suffocating, moronic, politically-correct, anti-liberal leftism…the standpoint which insists not that alternative views may be mistaken, even though held in good faith, but are clearly, objectively wrong – no argument – and therefore cannot possibly be countenanced”.

Working though my accumulation of emails, this tendency even emerges in Crikey. Cumulatively, it reads more left-wing than left-field. The opinions of CIS adjunct scholar, Miranda Darling, on security issues are worthless, we were told last week, because she is a former model (oh, and a conservative, too). Forget the fact that she has a masters degree in strategic affairs.

It will be interesting to see what else is in my inbox. I presume there’s one somewhere in there from a friend and former model – an elected delegate to the ConCon who’s spent ten years in the military – asking if Crikey regards her as a greater threat to our democracy and national security as Jemaah Islamiah. And one from another former model friend asking if we believe her idea of abandoning a promising career in journalism in favour of postgraduate studies that will enable her to put her skills at getting people to talk to better use as a clinical psychologist should be abandoned for a return to the lingerie shows.

The mail is certainly full of copies of Anne Summers’ piece from Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald where I’m included on a list of “Howard-approvers” who apparently “dominate the Government’s key cultural bodies and the media”.

Leo Sayer is back in the charts. Leftover seventies people who become self parodies in their dotage can be quite entertaining. Summers isn’t. She’s cause for concern. Doesn’t she agree with some of the criticisms I’ve made over the years of the Howard Government’s policy on refugees, immigration, same-sex rights, Indigenous affairs and transparency and integrity in public administration? It seems not.

Summers is absolutely entitled to disagree with my views. Anyone is. It’s interesting to see, though, how she has represented them.

The left – properly – have fulminated over the admission the New Yorker extracted from an unnamed Bush White House aide: “You are irrelevant. We make our own reality.”

That’s exactly what Summers has done. Presumably the left isn’t that keen on objective reality either. And if everyone in politics feels that way, it should be a cause of foreboding for us all.