Someone I knew once met Bertrand Russell who, when young, had met a very old man who had met Napoleon. Long lives take you into eras that seem unimaginably distant.

Take Kim Beazley senior, Kim’s dad, who has died at the age of 90. Education Minister in the Whitlam government, he was still going to talks, discussions about the intellectual life of politics until fairly recently. ‘Kim Beazley’s here’ someone said at the (seemingly weekly) ‘whither Labor’ debates at Trades Hall a few years ago. I looked round. It was pere, not fils.

What has and will be trotted out is Beazley pere’s famous statement that “when I joined the Labor party it contained the cream of the working-class; now it contains the dregs of the middle-class”.

Beazley pere was a leading member of Moral Rearmament, a group founded in the 30s as an attempt to attract intellectuals to an alternative to communism. It stressed individual asceticism and moral absolutism as the basis of a renewed West.

Though its founder Frank Buchman ‘thanked heaven’ for Hitler as a front line against the ‘anti-Christ’, and was pretty equivocal (to say the least) about anti-semitism, that stuff faded and the organisation came to be focused on social liberal issues – censorship (pro), abortion (anti), homos-xuality (duh) – as the 60s social revolution took hold.

Beazley pere was one of Labor’s old guard, who saw much of the Whitlamite liberalisation as anathema. He hated the ‘new class’ members entering the party – precisely because it was their causes that got Labor over the line, when a working-class vote couldn’t do it alone.

Whitlam, that old 30s cosmopolitan, had the superior insight that a social coalition had to be built in a world changed beyond the recognition of many in his party, each side accommodated to the other, and the power of the DLP exposed as increasingly illusory.

There’s a lesson there for Kevin 07.

F-ck knows what it is though.