Bob Hawke with wife Blanche D'Alpuget. Credit:Dallas Kilponen "It's impossible to describe the bonds we have, the physical love, the intellectual companionship, the joy we have in one another's company,'' said Bob. In one of her many interviews this week, Blanche said their love story would be their greatest legacy. "I know that when I'm dead and when Bob's dead, what people will remember was that this was a very great love. And it's the love story that will be remembered." Well, not just that. It is also the story of a great betrayal. The sour note is, of course, Hazel Hawke, Bob's long-suffering wife of 39 years, discarded when no longer needed for his political career. She is now living in a north shore nursing home with advanced Alzheimer's disease that mercifully will spare her knowledge of her life history being rewritten by the woman who stole the love of her life.

Hazel endured Bob's alcoholism and his womanising because she adored him, not because she had a burning desire to live in The Lodge, as Blanche seems to suggest. We know this because of Hazel's 1992 autobiography, My Own Life: ''I did not want to be one of those middle-aged women whose husbands discard them when they have served their purpose.'' The actress Rachael Blake, who plays Hazel in the telemovie, says Hazel's dream was of growing old with Bob. "It was to have a house, on a hill, and to have the grandchildren there. And I don't know that she ever got that.'' Bob and Hazel's oldest daughter, Sue Pieters-Hawke, laughed yesterday and said "that's creative" when asked for her thoughts on the media love fest in which her father and stepmother have been indulging. But she offered only a polite "no comment". It is not that anyone wishes ill to Blanche and Bob. But it is not right to airbrush Hazel out of the picture. And it is hard to get over the cold calculus underpinning this grand passion. "Divorce could cost Labor 3 per cent," Blanche once quoted Bob telling her.

According to Blanche's telling, Bob and Hazel's days at The Lodge were the happiest of their marriage: "It had been the fulfilment of a long-shared dream . . . Once the dream was behind them their relationship began to deteriorate." It was all very neat. Hazel only rates a handful of mentions in the book, reduced to a Stepford wife. "Hazel stayed in the background, running the house and rearing the children. She was a down-to-earth woman who . . . had no illusions about her husband's philandering." Just three of 30 pictures in the book feature Hazel, none flattering, and each is marked by a lack of physical closeness with Bob. Perhaps that was the way they were, or perhaps that is the impression the pictures seek to convey. In the dizzying round of publicity this week, Kerry O'Brien's interview on The 7.30 Report was a highlight as Blanche revealed the new story line she has fashioned for Hazel's marriage: "Couples need a dream and Bob and Hazel had a dream of the prime ministership and The Lodge and in a sense when that was over the dream was over and the marriage was over. It wasn't just the fact he'd fallen in love with me and I think very understandably she felt a great liberation from a marriage that had achieved its purpose." Perhaps that is the real point of Blanche's book, but it takes enormous licence on behalf of someone who can no longer answer for herself and correct the record before it becomes a new truth. Blanche claims Hazel was "relieved the sham was over" when Bob left her.

But that is not how Hazel's autobiography reads, nor does it explain Hazel's private anger in subsequent years, nor the fact that her daughters wore black in silent protest at Bob and Blanche's wedding. Bob's justification is more emotional: "Love is not something you can control," he told O'Brien. "The only significant other woman in my life while I was prime minister was Blanche, the only significant one. Once you fall in love, which I had with Blanche . . . that involves falling out of love with your wife. This is not something to be apologetic about. My love for and with Blanche has been the greatest thing in my life and I don't apologise for it." Loading Bob and Blanche are so full of good cheer, vivacity and fun, it is impossible not to be happy for them. They're not the first people to find love the second time around. But why do they need to thrust their romance in everyone's face, not least those who love and admire Hazel? devinemiranda@hotmail.com