There’s something awfully sad about old men falling out, especially in a public fashion.

To me Paul Keating has not seemed a happy soul for years, and he looks even unhappier now he feels aggrieved at what his old colleague Bob Hawke’s wife has written about him.

It all seems so unnecessary for Paul to even think he needs to defend his record. His achievements are clear and substantial enough not to be tarnished by what a biographer-turned-lover-turned-wife has written about her aging flame.

Off hand I can’t think of anyone associated with Labor governments during the 8os and 90s who does not regard Treasurer Keating as the person who dominated the often courageous decision-making of those years. Nothing in the extracts from Blanche d’Alpuget’s biography I have read is going to change that as the assessment of future historians whether or not Paul ever gets around to writing his own version of the governments he was associated with. His record speaks for itself.

Not that Hawke will go unappreciated. He completed the transformation of the Labor Party from one dominated by the union movement and that has been the foundation on which the party’s ascendancy at a state level and its competitiveness federally has been built.

As a prime minister he did not see the need to centralise all power around himself and, despite the obvious Keating irritation at the Manchu court of Hawke advisers, he allowed his ministers plenty of scope to actually be ministerial and initiate the kind of reforms Keating rightly wants to take a large share of the credit for.

To me that Hawke style of prime ministership was not a weakness but a strength and not deserving of the opprobrium heaped upon him by Keating in the letter published by The Australian this morning.

So what to make of this sad little argument? Very little other than a wish that the wife had not felt it necessary to write a second volume on the life of her lover and that time be allowed to deliver the verdict on two very considerable contributors to Australian political life.

*Richard Farmer worked on the Labor Party election campaigns during the Hawke/Keating years — but did not achieve membership of the Manchu Court by never seeking a position within the government itself.