Having watched the vanquished of Australian politics squeal like stuck pigs over this past fortnight, it's hard not to draw the obvious conclusion that "I will go quietly" means precisely the opposite.

Before the taste of defeat had evaporated from his morning croissant, Tony Abbott himself promised there'd be "no wrecking, no undermining, and no sniping" from him, right before he engaged in only that: the accidental wetsuit collision with the Daily Telegraph reporter ("Scott Morrison is a liar"); confession with Ray Hadley ("Seriously, I would've won") and the most damning of all, the interview with his blood brother Simon Benson ("Malcolm is actually me in disguise").

Then Maurice Newman gets the sack as Abbott's Prime Ministerial business adviser. Why? According to him: "There was little chance I would have survived under Turnbull because I am not his type of businessman… I believe in smaller government. I believe in markets." Funny, from a bloke who advised a PM whose idea of smaller government consisted of chaplains in schools and (until he could defend it no longer) taxpayers replacing the private sector salaries of new mothers. As for this belief in markets, what about squibbing tax reform (except to raise them), industrial relations reform, blocking a major agri-takeover by a US company and winking at $35 billion of submarines without a real tender, just a nod to Japan (the extremely tentative neighbour to our biggest economic partner)?

Andrew Bolt.

Then that turkey Andrew Bolt. For reasons Abbott should be compared to a summer's day, he says "I won't go through the whole list", before going through the whole list. We won't.

"See, I don't think Abbott is a great man because he's my friend. He's my friend because he's a great man."

The humility makes the eyes water. How lucky you are if Bolt picks you out of a crowd. And the now-hackneyed chiasmus, the "flipper" of writing, still such a lovely literary device until JFK ruined it. Even a Herald Sun blogger can flip a sentence these days. Someone must translate his musings into Latin and rocket them to Mars before the conflagration comes and it's too late!

But Bolt's shopping list of Abbott injustice is actually right. He wasn't a failure because he was "a woman hater" or a "crash-through insensitive bully with no people skills" or "too loyal" or "a homophobe". The real reason was because he listened to people like you, Andrew. And Maurice Newman and Piers Akerman and Miranda Devine, and then wondered why middle Australia could only conclude that he was the weirdo they always suspected he was. That's why Abbott failed, and you don't have to be a leftie – not even a little bit – to think so.