Braveheart, though, thinks we are lucky to have him. There are ''many other people as brilliant as me, just not as many as confident at saying it,'' he told a Fairfax reporter who interviewed him last year. This brilliance is not readily apparent. McTernan was a flack at No.10 Downing Street at the fag end of the Blair government. He was an apologist for Britain's disastrous part in the Iraq War and for Blair's sleazy brown-nosing of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi in the infamous 2007 ''Deal in the Desert'' that eventually had the convicted Lockerbie terrorist bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi returned home to a rapturous welcome in Tripoli. More recently, he was Labour's director of communications when it lost to the Scottish National Party at the 2007 election for the parliament in Edinburgh.

What he achieves for the Gillard government is hard to discern. Not since the fall of Billy McMahon in 1972 has there been a mob so hopelessly bad at talking to the governed. Labor has some mighty achievements to its credit, not least its management of the economy through the global financial crisis, but - as Paul Keating said a while ago - there is no grand narrative that brings the show together. The government lurches from ''announcement'' to ''announcement,'' all delivered in the plonking cliches of CorporateSpeak.

If I hear just one more minister wittering on ''in terms of the challenges facing modern Aussie families,'' I think I'll scream. Yes, I'm looking at you, David Bradbury. But it can't all be McTernan's fault. This lot would turn Ben Chifley's light on the hill into an illuminated facility visible on an elevated topographical feature.

A curious thing happened on the ABC's 7pm news last Tuesday. There was a brief sequence of Tony Abbott and assorted hangers-on plodding into someone's lounge room in suburban Melbourne.

Whenever I see Abbott on his hind legs I find myself wondering if the nation really wants a prime minister who walks like a chimpanzee. But that's not the point here. What puzzled me was that neither the newsreader nor the reporter offered any explanation for this odd interlude. It was not news, not in a fit, but there it was. Abbott plonked himself on to a couch, arranged his features into what he presumably imagined was a beguiling grin, and attempted to strike up a conversation with a small boy.