Crikey on John Winston Howard in Washington 2008

Crikey on Friday 7 March 2008.

Bernard Keane looks at John Howard.

"Having been abandoned by the Australian electorate, his own constituents and, finally, by his own party, John Howard has had to retreat to the United States to find a sanctuary from where he can defend his record.---
Defeat doesn't appear to have agreed with Howard. Perhaps, deep in the bowels of Parliament House, there's a Dorian Gray-style portrait of him. Now that the spell has been broken, the picture has reverted to the Howard with hair, black-rimmed specs and bad teeth, and the man himself has started decaying before our very eyes. There's something pathetic about his preaching to his last remaining mates. It must infuriate him that Australia has so quickly moved on from him, and taken most of his former colleagues with it, leaving him to look like a relic from another age. But as Paul Keating would tell him, there's nothing so ex as an ex-Prime Minister."