"It's certainly the case that Hanson's numbers at the end of last year have started to drift down," says the former federal attorney-general. "That's a good thing," he tells me. It was late last year, in August, that Hanson wore a burqa into the Senate and theatrically unveiled herself. It was also the time of Brandis' widely publicised speech denouncing her. While other government senators continued with question time as if nothing were out of the ordinary, Hanson, replete in her burqa, asked Brandis whether the government would ban the garment as a threat to national security. No, came Brandis' reply. "I am not going to pretend to ignore the stunt that you have tried to pull today by arriving in the chamber dressed in a burqa," he continued. Overwhelmingly, Australia's Muslims were law abiding. There was nothing inconsistent in being a good citizen and wearing a burqa, he said. Loading

Brandis told Hanson that, rather than a security risk, the federal police and ASIO considered it to be "vital for their intelligence and law enforcement work that they work cooperatively with the Muslim community". He'd know - as attorney-general, he was responsible for both agencies. "To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do, and I would ask you to reflect on what you have done." Amid loud applause from Labor and the Greens senators, Labor's Penny Wong stood to congratulate him. Does Brandis think he can take any credit for the stalling of One Nation's vote since? "I don't know," he replies. "But I think it is true that, as John Howard said, Hanson has nothing to offer Australia. "There will always be a core vote for a One Nation-style party, and that will always be greater in the states with the greater share of what I call the rural poor. "The question is whether Hanson's party was ever going to reach beyond that core to become like the Nick Xenophon party of the right. There was a time till recently when Xenophon's party was hoovering up disaffected voters from across South Australia.

"There was a distinct possibility that, by the middle of last year, Hanson would add to the core of right-wing redneck votes that she will always command the more diffuse disaffected vote. She was starting to reach beyond her core constituency; she's now back to her core. "The burqa moment, if anything, was the climax of it. But there were several moments of overreach." Including her brief advocacy for the anti-vaccination movement, which burned her badly. "She showed a style of politics that's not attractive to people looking to make a protest vote." Brandis spent 20 years working against One Nation within the Liberal party, including his 18 years as a senator. He always opposed the idea of directing Liberal, or Liberal National Party, preferences to One Nation. He didn't always win and he acknowledges that it will always be a temptation for the Coalition. "The Liberal and National parties must always be alert to the damage that can be done by dog whistling and catering to that sort of extreme, right-wing populism" Brandis similarly waged a struggle against the conservative forces within his own party. He bristles at John Howard's description of the Liberals as a party that had always been a "broad church" encompassing a liberal strand and a conservative one.

Senator Pauline Hanson wore a burqa into the Senate. Attorney-General George Senator Brandis repudiated her. Credit:Andrew Meares Robert Menzies very deliberately chose to name his creation "the Liberal party" as his memoirs note, "in the British classical liberal tradition, the tradition of Gladstone, not Disraeli". In that context, "Malcolm Turnbull was from the mainstream - he is the contemporary embodiment of that tradition, of Menzies, of Holt, and, ultimately, Fraser". Howard in opposition in the 1980s was the first leader to bring "the conservative influence to bear", he argues. And the conservatives are now trying to hijack the party, according to the former leader of the government in the Senate: "Attempts to make it a more right-wing party have never ended well," Brandis says, and that leads him pretty quickly to Tony Abbott. "Abbott's leadership was probably the only time that the Liberal Party in government pursued a set of policies so ideologically right-wing," according to Brandis. For instance, Abbott's "reluctance to embrace multiculturalism was out of sync with modern Australian values, and the trenchant resistance" to same sex marriage "was increasingly out of touch with community values". But one of the reasons Brandis has been enticed out of the cabinet and Parliament with the offer of a plum diplomatic post is that the conservative forces are on the rise in the Queensland coalition, where branch support for Brandis was fast fading. And where support for conservative hero Peter Dutton is strong.

Dutton's victory in creating the mega-ministry of Home Affairs, taking from Brandis the federal police and ASIO, was the final evidence of his ascendancy in a long series of cabinet struggles against Brandis. Brandis started in government as a villain of Labor and the Greens. Notably because of his effort, ultimately a failure, to amend the Racial Discrimination Act, clause 18C in particular, and his argument that "people do have a right to be bigots". So Brandis finds it "bizarre" that he ended up as a darling of the left. "My positions have been stubbornly consistent throughout," he says. Exhibit his handling of Hanson: "Bigots should be dealt with by denunciation, not censorship. If you want to fuel a Hanson sense of victimhood, just try to censor her." Brandis, proud of his record in defending liberal values at home, will now have the chance to advance them abroad. In pursuit of free and open trade. "This is more than a time of managing a close relationship," he says of his London job. "It's a time with a particular outcome sought, and that is a free trade agreement" between Australia and post-Brexit Britain. People have a right to be free traders. Peter Hartcher is international editor.