This confounded people in the publishing industry who had long based their commissions on the assumption that leftists bought more books than conservatives and that despite Howard's long time in office he was not a glamorous figure and would be hard to sell. The book's success demonstrated yet again that most people in the political class and the news media still did not understand his appeal. 

So let me try to explain it. Howard was a conservative who successfully appealed to electorates that were once regarded as diehard Labor. He appealed to blue-collar workers partly by offering to turn them into contractors and small businesspeople. It also helped that in Howard's term of office, his free market economic policies saw average real wages grow by 21 per cent.

But just as importantly, he appealed to traditional values like patriotism and an orderly immigration process, which intellectuals and the leftist political class thought should be consigned to the dustbin of history. He could appeal to blue-collar workers convincingly because of his own background, especially his education at a state selective high school in Sydney in the 1950s, where he absorbed the prevailing egalitarian ethos and its disdain for self-promoters, salesmen and show-offs.

He was never impressed by spin doctors and knew the voters he needed could see through them too. He knew if he told political lies to his voters they would not be fooled for long. 

At the same time as the old state high school playgrounds enforced egalitarianism, the curriculum in their classrooms offered the best of British high culture, especially Shakespeare: in my case A Midsummer Night's Dream in first year, then Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. All up, it was a formidable combination that gave its students the confidence to attempt anything. It is little wonder our elder statesman is in such despair about the educational legacy that his Labor successors have created.