‘Even his cruellest lines had a certain wit and elegance’: Crikey readers on the barbs to add to our Paul Keating Sledge-O-Meter

On what was missing from our Paul Keating Sledge-O-Meter

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans writes: You missed a few PJK classics, as I recorded in this paragraph extracted from my book, Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir. I think you’ll agree that the last on my list has a particular claim to immortality.

“Even some of his cruellest lines had a certain wit and elegance about them. Think of his description of Malcolm Fraser in 1982 as an ‘Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades’; or his response to Andrew Peacock returning as Liberal leader in 1989, ‘Can a soufflé rise twice?’; or his ‘Because I want to do you slowly’ response to John Hewson asking him in 1992 why he would not call an early election; or his dazzling extended riff responding to John Howard’s claim that the 1950s was a golden age, suggesting that Howard’s, and Hewson’s, proper place was in a museum alongside the other icons of that age ‘the Morphy Richards toaster, the Qualcast mower… and the AWA radiogram’.