The last time I was in the same room with Nick Cater — ideological enforcer on The Australian and now apparently a best-selling author courtesy of hectares of free advertising by the usual suspects in the Murdoch press — he was leaping out of his executive chair with fear in his eyes.

This was in 2011, a year before I gleefully took redundancy from the paper and fled the building after 16 years as a subeditor, production editor and feature writer. I was seated in front of his desk and had just put my arms on it, leaning forward in response to his sneering comment that I was “just a subeditor”. This was the climax of his attempt to put me in my place for not showing due deference to one of his pet contributors on The Australian Review of Books, of which I was sole subeditor as well as production editor.

Perhaps he saw something red in my eyes, because he was out of his chair in a flash, as if he’d found a funnel-web in his coffee cup, calling for the assistance of managing editor Louise Evans (now, hilariously, in charge of Radio National) and declaring he didn’t wish to be in a room with me again unless someone else was also present. As another Nick, Greiner, once famously said: “The diddums.”

All this is just a lot of lost circulation and tumbling advertising revenue under the bridge, so I was somewhat taken aback when fellow New South Wales Central Coast resident Bill Leak, who well knows that I am not a Cater fan, invited me to a book launch he was organising on May 11 for Cater at the Sit O’Clock Thai restaurant in Woy Woy owned by his delightful partner Goong, a model of immigrant energy and enterprise.

I was glad to accept; as a freelancer you must take stories as you find them, and thanks to the Murdoch empire’s megaphone, Cater was a national news story, for this week at least. When I saw the inevitable puff piece in local company rag the Central Coast Express Advocate the week before, I felt this par was aimed straight at me:

“[Cater] said that although there would be other launch functions, including in Sydney and Melbourne, Woy Woy was also chosen as he wanted to get away from the ‘cafe latte belt’ and be with people whose voices are rarely heard.”

As someone who had moved to the Woy Woy peninsula several years before Cater stepped off the plane from Britain to begin his new life as a faithful, spiteful lickspittle of Rupert Murdoch in the colonies, bringing with him his special brand of feline, preening nastiness, best captured in The Australian‘s point-scoring Cut & Paste section, I certainly qualified as a local.

He’d chosen hardcore working-class territory, settled and built by fettlers and fisherfolk; Goong’s restaurant is just across the railway tracks from several large public housing estates, and during the Your Rights at Work campaign the peninsula was festooned with those yellow signs. In 2010 despite the rolling fiasco that previous federal MP Belinda Neal had proven to be, Deborah O’Neill won the seat of Robertson against fervid expectations she would fail. Around here a university education is something to aspire to, not sneer at. I suspect many locals would have been wondering whether they could wear a Harley Davidson buckle with that mysterious-sounding belt Cater had mentioned. And as for voices not being heard, that girl who won The Voice, didn’t she come from Woy Woy?

Come the night, it was a full house of about 50 or so, but I couldn’t spy anyone else who lived on the peninsula — you couldn’t count those, such as Leak and H.G. Nelson (aka Greig Pickhaver), who had made the 20-minute trek across The Rip Bridge from the millionaire’s belt around Kilcare, Wagstaffe and Hardys Bay. I did see quite a few former colleagues from News Limited and others who were quite clearly from the big smoke, however. The locals obviously had better things to do.

When Miranda Devine, trailing her latest Twitter martyrdom behind her like a soiled bridal train, made a late entry Cater evinced schoolboy excitement, declaring “the real star” had arrived and ushering her proudly to her table. So it was clearly a friendly, if not hand-picked, crowd.

The truth was nobody really expected any locals to be there: this was made clear during Jack the Insider’s pre-introductory remarks, when he painted the very tired stereotype of a Gauloise-smoking, beret-bedecked undergraduate pretending to have read Jean-Paul Sartre — not an author familiar to too many Woy Woy inhabitants, I venture. But they would have recognised Jack’s next target, Mark “crazy with a K” Latham, who apparently doesn’t think much of Cater’s book and has had the appalling bad taste to say so twice in print. Latham, Jack said, was a reliable standard: if he doesn’t like something, it must be good:

“Crazy with a K putting shit on a book is the highest recommendation I can think of.”

“You send Hans Blix to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, well he’s hardly going to come back and say he can’t find any …”

Next up was Leak, an accomplished raconteur, with a well-honed anecdote about his university day (half-day, really). The man really should gather all those stories of his into a one-man show, because he has a million of them and most of them are not just funny but chest-crushingly so. This one was a fair way off that sublime height, but funny enough. Cater’s book, Leak suggested in serious mode, was an important contribution to the national conversation:

“You know a book is going to be controversial when people who haven’t read it are queuing up to have a go at you about what they suspect might be in it. I think maybe they’re worried it may say something about people just like them. Worse still, it might be true.”

I think potential readers who see and hear what Cater and his boosters say about the book would have a reasonable idea of what’s in it. Besides, I have a firm rule of not reading books in which the central premise, which Cater readily admits is the case with his book, is that a specific social, political, cultural or religious group is undermining society or is the cause of most of its ills.

Next up was Nelson, that sly send-up merchant, whose task it was to quiz Cater amusingly. Wise move, this, for Nelson has the ability to make any situation seem absurd, but without rancour, and he ensured the discussion was as entertaining as possible. Then Cater opined as an opener:

“You know, when I came here, H.G., this was the sort of country where if the fence was broke we’d get out there in the paddock and we’d fix it. Now it’s the sort of country where if the fence is broke you call in David Gonski to have an inquiry, and then you’d sit around and probably have an apology from those who broke the fence.”

Who knew he began life as a migrant to this country in the outback mending fences? On “useless” university degrees:

“These guys that come out with a degree in post-national feminism or whatever and are employed for two years, filling up the supermarket shelves in Coles, must be furious that the people they went to school with who went off to learn something useful like a trade, are actually earning more money than they’ll ever earn in their entire lives. Look where all the Mercedes dealers are, they’re not in Annandale.”

Then came this, in response to a query from Nelson about the sports doping uproar, and Cater suggested it was an example of a syndrome he named after former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix:

“You send Hans Blix to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, well he’s hardly going to come back and say he can’t find any …”

The crowd thought this was a hoot, even though the truth was that Blix didn’t find WMDs and refused to back down, for which he was roundly and savagely attacked by a Bush administration desperate to fabricate evidence to justify invading Iraq. Facts, who needs them? On the internet and social media:

“We thought this was going to bring us all together, we thought this was a way we could all talk together, but in effect what we do is talk to the people we like and we avoid the people we don’t like.”

Just like real life, then.

As part of a general discussion about the ABC, Nelson hit the vaudeville switch and brought up the show he and his sidekick Roy Slaven (aka John Doyle) did for the ABC called Club Buggery, which Cater claimed was one of the cultural sirens calling him to migrate to Australia, this despite the fact the show didn’t first air until 1995, six years after his arrival. And when Nelson mentioned that he never felt comfortable appearing on Spicks and Specks because he hated the Bee Gees, Cater replied gnomically:

“Well I’ve always felt that the Bee Gees were more offensive than buggery, myself …”

He might get an argument about that if he hangs around outside the Bayview Hotel in Woy Woy for a while on a Saturday night. But I suspect this visit will be his last, so he’s safe.