PAUL Keating has revealed the delicate etiquette involved in a Treasurer conducting business with a naked Prime Minister.

And for the first time he gave a public evaluation of what might have been called the honourable member involved.

The former Prime Minister was launching the diaries of Gareth Evans, “Inside the Hawke Keating Government” (MUP), an account of the years 1984-86.

Mr Keating used the book to talk about his own place in that period, and to continue his insistence it was him and not then Prime Minister Bob Hawke who kept the Government going.

There were his difficulties with Bob, not least talking to him when he was nude.

“I’d arrive at The Lodge at 10.30 and find Bob sunning himself by the pool,” Mr Keating told a launch audience at the Australian National University where Mr Evans is chancellor.

“He often used to do this nude.

“I did have a few things to say about midgets ... on the occasion, but this is not the occasion for elaborating”.

But that’s what he did, revealing a story which long had been in circulation to illustrate the Hawke/Keating divide, but which he had never before used in public.

“Gareth and I went out there in suits one day, sweating, and there’s Bob in the nude,” he recalled.

“I said, Don’t worry, midgets ...” and gave a hand gestures involving his thumb and index finger extended parallel and close together.

Riffling off the diary’s less strident recollections, Mr Keating argued Mr Hawke was ineffective as Prime Minister between 1984 and 1989, a five-year period in which he said he drove the government’s agenda.

And he was unsparing with his predecessor.

“Bob could cry for Aborigines but he wouldn’t do anything for them,” he said at one point.

Another target was for minister Graham Richardson, with whom he said he clashed over the issue of fixed mortgage rates.

“These people have to realise there is number one and a number two in this place. And Richardson was a number two,” he said.

But he praised Mr Evans’ book, saying there was “an immediacy and an authenticity about it”.

Mr Evans compared the rigorous cabinet meetings of these days with what he knew of meetings in the Abbott government executive.

He said the Prime Minister was first among equals, “but only just”.

“The concept of a captain’s pick or captain’s call, “ he said, referring to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, “just didn’t exist in those days.”