Downer is perhaps a convenient fall guy. He has spent a fair slice of his career being taunted as a foppish member of the bunyip aristocracy, having been set up for ridicule early through a story concocted for the purpose by Hawke Labor minister Mick Young. Young, a South Australian shearer before politics, claimed he once drove up to the Downers’ baronial mansion in Adelaide to collect a cheque for shearing work. He was astounded at the grandeur of the first building he came to. A manservant set him to rights: “Oh no sir, this merely the gatehouse,” said the retainer. “This is where young Alexander keeps his dolls.” Whatever one’s view of Downer, he served his nation for decades and does not deserve the shabby treatment he is receiving as the current Liberal prime minister, Scott Morrison, contorts himself into every position but upright to try to contain a US President who is daily becoming more demented. Loading Morrison may have felt himself in a difficult spot when he got a call from the President who had invited him for a state dinner at the White House, but he might also consider himself fortunate to have received not much more than a heavy-breathing phone call.

The President of Finland, Sauli Niinisto, will doubtless never get out of his nightmares the experience of sitting next to Trump this week through what was supposed to be a bilateral press conference in the White House. Niinisto - who Trump thought came from some place called “Finnishland” - was forced to sit speechless through a seemingly endless Trump tirade. The flipped-out President of the United States called for his political opponents to be tried for treason, called the chairman of the US House of Representatives' Intelligence committee Adam Schiff “Shifty Schiff” and “a lowlife” who was not worthy of carrying Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s jockstrap, and declared he was proud of inventing the term “Fake Media”, but now wanted to change it to “the Corrupt Media”, whose practitioners were “the enemy of the people”. Illustration: Andrew Dyson Credit: For much of this meltdown, Trump raved about how his famous phone call to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was “beautiful” and “perfect”. Zelensky, he insisted, had agreed the call was “perfect” and there was “no pressure, no pressure”.

This, of course, was the perfect phone call in which Trump put it on Zelensky eight times to dig dirt on Joe Biden, and which has sparked the current impeachment inquiry. So what are Australians to make of Trump calling up Morrison in quest of material on Downer’s unexceptional role in passing on the detail of a conversation with one of Trump’s henchmen, a dodgy fellow named George Papadopoulos? Morrison himself - fresh, of course, from that very chummy state visit to Washington - told Sky News this week it was a “fairly uneventful call”, that it was “not one that I'd characterise as being ladled with pressure” and that Trump was merely seeking “a point of contact” with the Australian government. In the absence of a transcript, we have the Prime Minister’s words, though what constitutes a “fairly uneventful call” from Donald Trump these days remains a matter for some conjecture. And that the US President would call the Australian prime minister for a “point of contact” seems as exotic as the idea that a phone conversation from Trump in his current mood could be seen as “not being ladled with pressure”. Papadopoulos, whose conversation with Downer led to the Mueller inquiry that sticks so uncomfortably in Trump’s craw, has, by the by, since been jailed for lying to the FBI.

Papadopoulos has taken to composing hysterical tweets declaring Downer was a spy, crowing that “Downer was a fool. I played him the entire meeting.” For good measure, he is also celebrating what he believes is the Australian government’s easy acquiescence to Trump: “The Australians already flipped on him,” he cheered in a tweet this week. That’s not a surprising conclusion, given that Morrison promised Trump that Australia would help out. Scott Morrison with Donald Trump, and ambassador Joe Hockey's letter to US Attorney-General William Barr. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen And that wasn’t surprising either, given that Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, wrote to US Attorney-General William Barr way back in May, promising the Australian government would “use its best endeavours” in assisting the Trump-ordered investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election. All very well. But this was never a normal request by an ally. It is a push to fuel a purely partisan, purely domestic US hunt for any scalp that might help an increasingly unglued Trump out of a hole he has dug for himself.