Latham warning!!!!

If you are reading this right now (10.35 pm 15 Sept), the ABC seems to now be running the Latham Enough Rope interview. Quick, run to the TV.

Update: I generally share Currency Lad's take on the interview. Despite his childish and churlish nature, I felt a little sorry for him, and some degree of respect for his getting out of a game that he finally realized (only took 25 years or so!) was not for him.

Half pushed into the leadership before he was ready, and then with a sudden illness that surely made him think about how much life he may have left to enjoy with his children (especially given his own father's early demise,) he had strong personal reasons to regret his ascent - as he did, almost immediately.

I sympathized with his comment about how most political relationships are shallow, as (I expect) would many people who have ever had even the slightest involvement with any political party.

To be a successful party politician, an interest in policy formulation and good government unfortunately has to be tied to an acceptance of the frequent pettiness and personality basis of internal party politics. The ALP federally is the current "star" victim of this, but the Liberal Party (especially in my part of the world) also has such longstanding and complex personality-based internal wars that it makes active involvement by someone not interested in such histories and clashes extremely unappealing.

What I am saying is that I understand Latham's cynicism of party politics. Unfortunately, though, people being people, democracies are always going to be like this to one degree or another, and it does seem strange for Latham to take so long to have "had a gutful" as he might say.

That said, he obviously has such a spectacular blind spot for self criticism, and was in other ways so clearly temperamentally unfit for the PM job, he wasn't a bullet dodged by the Australian public; he was more like a nuclear meltdown narrowly averted.