Sarah Ferguson speaks to former prime minister John Howard on 7.30 (Image: 7.30/ABC)
Sarah Ferguson speaks to former prime minister John Howard on 7.30 (Image: 7.30/ABC)

Booking the guest On the day he lost the top job, former prime minister Scott Morrison was described by Bernard Keane as “not merely Australia’s worst prime minister, he’s the worst prime minister for his own party on either side of politics”. And indeed, he has a special and powerful talent for ruining his colleagues’ day.

Not content with having done so to Josh Frydenberg, Keith Pitt, Karen Andrews, Mathias Cormann and Peter Dutton, he reached back, past his own time in Parliament, to bugger up John Howard. Howard went on 7.30 last night, just wanting to talk about his new book, A Sense of Balance, and had to instead sustain a grilling at the hands of Sarah Ferguson, which he eventually got sick of:

JOHN HOWARD: I don’t want to be combative, and I know you don’t want to be combative …

SARAH FERGUSON: Nor do I, sir.

JOHN HOWARD: But I thought we were going to talk about …

SARAH FERGUSON: There are plenty of things to talk about …

JOHN HOWARD: I know, I know, well, I don’t want to be — suggest for a moment I have been got on this program under false pretences.

SARAH FERGUSON: No, we certainly asked you on this program to talk about some of the contents of your book, but you would not deny me the opportunity to ask you an important …

Spinning records Morrison has also been subject to the fate that befalls any disgraced public figure — the swift updating of their Wikipedia page. In Morrison’s case, the list of his roles in government just got significantly longer:

These changes have not come without controversy, though. The editors of the page are having a real nerd fight as to whether the change to the infobox is warranted:

ITBF: I have yet to see any sources that unequivocally state whether Morrison was actually appointed as ‘Minister for X’ or as an acting minister in the way that the deputy prime minister becomes acting prime minister … We should be waiting for confirmation from official sources as to the exact nature of the appointments, not using tabloid sources that don’t understand the difference and making guesses …

Nick-D: You might be right, but neither the Guardian or the ABC are tabloids, and they are explicitly stating that Morrison was the minister for these things. Michelle Grattan is also not a tabloid journalist and is stating the same.

After a long debate, one editor concludes: “No one is truly going to look back and say that Scott Morrison was treasurer during this period, they are going to say it was Josh Frydenberg — the fact that Scott Morrison may too have technically been treasurer too is more of a sidenote; an oddity.”

Frankly, we’re more concerned about his godawful LinkedIn page — Morrison has resolutely failed to action ANY of the handy tips we got together for him a few week ago, and now we see he wasn’t even keeping his “experience” section up to date:

Going on the offensive And finally, after some for-the-ages Morrisonia via interviews, the former PM gave us a long, long, interminably long statement on Facebook last night. The Australian ran it as an article and had to cut 200 words. Its near 1300 words contain a wonderfully shrugged confession that he didn’t remember half the ministries he’d appointed himself to (“There was a lot going on” may go down in history as Morrison’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”).

It contains a truly magnificent non-apology — pulling a “Sorry if you were offended by my bizarre addiction to secrecy and potential undermining of democratic norms” in the direction of his colleagues. What it doesn’t contain is a single indication as to why any of this had to be kept secret.