For many, it is not an entirely convincing reinvention. ''It's a performance piece,'' says Catherine Deveny, a comedian and writer (whose columns Bolt has, surprisingly, said he reads). ''If it wasn't so dangerous, it would be hilarious.'' A woman who lived with Bolt in the early 1980s says: ''He certainly was not the conservative figure he is now. It's like he found a niche.'' Later that same decade, the writer and academic Robert Manne wrote for Bolt when he was editor of the opinion pages. ''He was conservative but so was I,'' Manne says. Ten years later - Manne's politics having changed - Bolt attacked him at a multicultural conference. ''I was astonished he was the same man,'' Manne told me. ''He obviously saw there was reputation and money to be made from being conservative. There were no examples of such people in Australia. In the mid '90s this type emerged, and he was one of the first.'' So is Andrew Bolt the opinionator a construct, the creation of a media-savvy brain that saw the opportunities offered by the internet and by the absence of significant right-wing voices among the commentariat in the mid-1990s? A great many people think so. A former journalist who has worked with Bolt says: ''A big part of me admires Bolt for having built all this out of nothing. But it is so cynical because that is not who he is.''

Steve Harris, the editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times Group from 1992 to 1997, remembers a conversation with Bolt: ''There was no shortage of people filling the left-hand side, I told him, but there was a shortage of people of the right. He responded by saying, 'Yes, there is a shortage in that area, maybe I can help fill that space.' '' And he has filled it in spades. But, unlike an earlier generation of conservative print columnists who explored ideas, Bolt understands that to succeed in today's media you need to create controversy. The media is increasingly dominated by commentary and opinion, by The Drum and The Punch, by Q&A and Can of Worms, by personal blogs and newspaper reader comments online. Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. ''Bolt's genius is that he's always finding the fault-lines and finding an argument,'' Lachlan Harris, press secretary to Kevin Rudd when he was prime minister, told me. The resultant toxicity of our politics is only going to get worse. ''In 2004, we estimated that people were getting 70 per cent of political information from news outlets, television or papers,'' Harris says. ''Now it is flipped: most people get most of their political information from opinion, from a medium that is dependent upon division of opinion.'' Although Bolt describes himself as a conservative columnist, he is less a William Safire than a Billy Graham. He is like an evangelist, providing fixed points of reference for people who feel confused in a world where certainty has eroded. He tells people what they should be thinking - and hordes of followers lap it up.

Like the Fox News jocks, Bolt tends to stick to just a few themes - ''no stolen generation'', ''honour the churches'', ''frown on divorce'', ''crack down on welfare'', ''stop the cult of victimhood'', ''stop immigration'', ''end multiculturalism'' - and to hammer them over and over. Top of the list in the right-wing song book, though, is the non-existence of climate change. Bolt is utterly obdurate when it comes to the subject. ''I thought he wrote too much about climate change,'' Guthrie says, ''but he was immoveable.'' Bolt is credited with being an important factor in the collapse of the political consensus for action on climate change that existed in 2007. Just five years ago, a Lowy Institute poll found 68 per cent of respondents agreed that global warming was a serious and pressing problem, and that ''we should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs''. This year, that number had fallen to 41 per cent. ''The strange distortion of the climate change debate is down to a few people and he's one of them,'' Jonathan Green says. Bolt gives no quarter, dismissing ''warmists'', the scientific consensus on climate change and, in 2008 quoting Christopher Monckton, one of his preferred sources: ''The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.'' You would never guess Bolt used to write for the ''Environs'' column in The Age. Or that his younger brother, Richard, helped develop Australia's first comprehensive national cap-and-trade scheme. ''Climate change threatens the world's and Australia's economic activities, communities and ecosystems,'' was the key message of the former National Emissions Trading Taskforce's final framework report, released in December 2007. ''It is in Australia's interests to promote international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.'' Richard Bolt was deputy chairman of this taskforce and, in May last year, the Gillard government appointed him to the advisory board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy.

