Hey, I didn’t make the call. Tony Abbott did.

That was my reaction when the Twitter trolls came after me in a torrent after I revealed on Paul Murray Live on Sky News that the former prime minister had given me some gratuitous advice: “Shut the fuck up.”

Some of the twitterati claimed I must have made it up because “Mr. Abbott would never use that sort of language”. Some thought it was “fake news”, as the Donald would say. And I will concede it’s the sort of unseemly, and potentially damaging, message I would never leave on anybody’s telephone message bank. Friend or foe.

But an angry Tony Abbott did.

I said, on Paul Murray’s eponymous show, that it was a few weeks ago. I have since checked back and worked out the abusive message was left on Thursday, June 22. (I now recall the timetable because that was the week they had the dry-run anti-terrorist security lockdown of Parliament House).

I had been on Sky the night before and repeated something I’d said on Neil Mitchell’s 3AW program the day before: that some Abbott supporters were so relentlessly determined to destroy Malcolm Turnbull they were leaking to Bill Shorten’s office. I’d heard News Corp was also onto the story.

An irate Tony Abbott got my super private phone number from a mutual friend, introduced himself, and left a message demanding that I provide him with proof to back up what I had said, or name the source for what I’d said. “Otherwise,” he said, “shut the fuck up.”

I played it to my staff in Melbourne that morning and also in a “guess who?” quiz with my former HINCH producer Dermot O’Brien, at our regular Romeo’s lunch catch-up in Toorak two days after it happened.

It only came up again last week because Abbott had made headlines with his goats and volcanoes “climate change does more good than harm” speech in London.  Then another former prime minister, Julia Gillard, gave the 2017 Bob Hawke lecture in Adelaide and started talking about the election of Donald Trump as President and Brexit and an “age of anxiety”.

I was asked about former prime ministers airing their views and suggested Tony Abbott, the man we used to dub the “Mad Monk”, should, perhaps, heed his own message machine advice.

***

And now, in reference to the NEG — the national energy guarantee — let’s talk about chewing gum.

Winston Peters, currently playing kingmaker across the ditch, almost cost the Labour government the 2005 election when he derisively shot down finance minister Michael Cullen’s budget “chewing gum” tax cuts.

They were such a big deal, and so generous to the worker, the New Zealand First leader said, that everybody would be able to afford a pack of chewing gum.

If the Turnbull/Frydenberg NEG predictions are accurate, in 2020 your electricity bill will have come down by $2 a week. Bring on the chewing gum!

To be fair, I don’t believe NEG is an abbreviation of negativity (as The Greens and Labor would have you believe). And I don’t believe it is a Turnbull kowtow to Abbott. I also don’t believe it signals an exit from the Paris Agreement which (pre goats and volcanoes) the Abbott government signed. Give it a chance.

***

Speaking of chances. It is hard to believe that it will be 10 years next month since prime minister John Howard not only lost office but also lost his own seat — the first PM to achieve (?) that distinction since Stanley Bruce in 1929.

It was an ignominious end for a politician who, before he regained his party’s leadership and then the keys to The Lodge, had said he would have to be “Lazarus with a triple bypass” to make a comeback.

You have to wonder if yon Lazarus ever creeps into Tony Abbott’s thoughts these days?

He was asked on 2GB this week about comebacks and said:

“When you’re an ex (leader) the only way you can come back is if you are drafted. That’s a pretty rare and unusual business in politics. The only way an ex could ever come back is by way of a draft and that’s almost impossible to imagine.”

But you can dream.

***

During last year’s federal election campaign, we covered 11,250 kilometres in the Justice Bus and I promised, if elected, I’d keep going back to rural and regional Victoria. At least once a month.

Last week’s adventure by train and car was to Bendigo, Swan Hill and Mildura. In each town, we visited the local RSL club just in time for the 6pm recital of The Ode “… at the going down of the sun …”. It’s a great, stirring, tradition.

In Mildura, I caught up with the old and the new in the veterans’ world: 92-year-old former Nationals MP Ken Wright and Afghanistan war veteran, Tyson Matheson.