Milne won’t stick around hammering old themes entertainingly like Alan Ramsey, he doesn’t care enough about issues to do the polemic like Akerman/Albrechtsen/Bolt, he won’t ascend to the high Second Draft Of History plane that Paul Kelly seems to occupy, and he won’t do the hard graft that Michelle Grattan and George Megalogenis do.

Of all the ministers in the Howard government it is Downer’s whose legacy has been most comprehensively erased. Rudd speaking Mandarin in Beijing, the Bali conference, NATO - you’d think Smith had directly succeeded Evans as Foreign Minister. Only East Timor stands as a recognisable Downer legacy, and once Rudd/Smith/whoever deals with a post-Gusmao/Ramos Horta era, that too will have gone. Downer’s virulent reaction to Senator Russell Trood’s well-considered paper on foreign policy was instructive - even within the Liberal Party, nostalgia and personal fondness aside, his legacy is fading fast.

As far as Downer goes personally, he’s a big man in Adelaide and rather smaller elsewhere. His wife won’t go to Cyprus because it’s so beastly dull, darling, and for all his faults Downer is uxorious. Going to Canberra might increasingly be a grind for him, but where else would he go? Sitting around the Adelaide Club would get dull fast. SA State politics? Yeah, right. Washington? The conservative tide’s going out, all the haunts where Republicans endure Democrat administrations are already being inundated with CVs. What if the next Liberal candidate for Mayo were a moderate? What if that candidate lost to Labor? That would erase his legacy all the more, an appalling prospect for a proud man.

Australians and Americans tend to be crap at international disputes involving ancient ethnic hatreds - witness the squeamishness over Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or Fiji. The Cyprus thing is too hard for Downer, and he knows it. Smith is appealing to Downer’s vanity, and (contra Paulus) he’s almost certainly seen some polling showing Labor looking good in Mayo.

Downer’s capacity for cunning plans is over. He’d never be truly convincing in a Shadow Treasury role - not to the wider public, not to businesspeople and their economists. He’d never nail Swan. As was said of Howard this time last year, he’s a man who should retire but has nowhere else to go. Interesting that the Liberals haven’t developed the capacity to diagnose and bury political corpses.

We knew what we were getting with Rudd, in terms of social conservatism. Not happy, but no longer angry like I was pre Nov 2007.

Can’t see Downer having another crack at it at this stage of his life.

After the federal election, Downer instantly lost whatever power he might have held with the UN. And it’s not as if Stephen Smith would have made it DFAT’s #1 priority to get Downer the Cyprus role.

So the UN Secretariat wouldn’t have approached him unless they actually respected his diplomatic skills. How ’bout that.