The next Pezzullo will be harder to spot — and harder still to cut out

If there’s something that’s always been clear about Mike Pezzullo, it’s that he is a man of many convictions but very little courage. He has spent the past few decades swanning about Canberra as a cross between Malcolm Tucker, Frank Grimes and a police dog — an operator and enforcer who has managed to shape the defining policies of successive governments simply by being present and persistent. He is the inevitable result of decades of hands-off politicking, left to thrive like black mould.

Pezzullo is the perfect personification of the overweening loserdom of contemporary Australian politics, where the unchecked and the unremarkable walk the barren wastes of the body politic like mighty Uruk-hai.